Title
WAlloc: An efficient wear-aware allocator for non-volatile main memory.
Abstract
The non-volatile memory (NVM) has the illustrious merits of byte-addressability, fast speed, persistency and low power consumption, which make it attractive to be used as main memory. Commonly, user process dynamically acquires memory through memory allocators. However, traditional memory allocators designed with in-place data writes are not appropriate for non-volatile main memory (NVRAM) due to the limited endurance. For instance, the number of write operations is merely 108 times per PCM cell. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the wear-oblivious of DRAM-oriented designed allocator¿glibc malloc and the inefficiency of wear-conscious allocator¿NVMalloc. For example, the average imbalance factor (the maximum/the average) of memory allocation is about 7.5 and 3, respectively. Based on our observations, we propose WAlloc, an efficient wear-aware manual memory allocator designed for NVRAM, decouples metadata and data, uses Less Allocated First Out allocation policy and redirects the data writes. Experimental results show that the wear-leveling of WAlloc outperforms that of NVMalloc about 30% and 60% under random workloads and well-distributed workloads, respectively. In addition, considering the trade-off between space and wear-leveling, WAlloc reduces average data memory writes in 64 bytes block by average 1.5X comparing with malloc with almost 8% extra space overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/PCCC.2015.7410326
IPCCC
Keywords
Field
DocType
Non-Volatile Memory, memory allocator, wear aware
Registered memory,Semiconductor memory,Interleaved memory,Computer science,Non-volatile random-access memory,Parallel computing,Cache-only memory architecture,Real-time computing,Memory management,Memory map,Computer memory
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1097-2641
4
0.40
References 
Authors
30
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Songping Yu184.89
Nong Xiao2649116.15
Ming-Zhu Deng383.20
Yuxuan Xing451.78
Fang Liu51188125.46
Zhiping Cai637644.98
Wei Chen78612.45