Access Type

Open Access Thesis

Date of Award

January 2013

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Song Jiang

Abstract

With significant advantages in capacity, power consumption, and price, solid state disk (SSD) has good potential to be employed as an extension of dynamic random-access memory, such that applications with large working sets could run efficiently on a modestly configured system. While initial results reported in recent works show promising prospects for this use of SSD by incorporating it into the management of virtual memory, frequent writes from write-intensive programs could quickly wear out SSD, making the idea less practical.

This thesis makes four contributions towards solving this issue. First, we propose a scheme, HybridSwap, that integrates a hard disk with an SSD for virtual memory man-agement, synergistically achieving the advantages of both. In addition, HybridSwap can constrain performance loss caused by swapping according to user-specified QoS requirements.

Second, We develop an efficient algorithm to record memory access history and to identify page access sequences and evaluate their locality. Using a history of page access patterns HybridSwap dynamically creates an out-of-memory virtual memory page layout on the swap space spanning the SSD and hard disk such that random reads are served by SSD and sequential reads are asynchronously served by the hard disk with high efficiency.

Third, we build a QoS-assurance mechanism into HybridSwap to demonstrate the flexibility of the system in bounding the performance penalty due to swapping. It allows users to specify a bound on the program stall time due to page faults as a percentage of the program's total run time.

Forth, we have implemented HybridSwap in a recent Linux kernel, version 2.6.35.7. Our evaluation with representative benchmarks, such as Memcached for key-value store, and scientific programs from the ALGLIB cross-platform numerical analysis and data processing library, shows that the number of writes to SSD can be reduced by 40% with the system's performance comparable to that with pure SSD swapping, and can satisfy a swapping-related QoS requirement as long as the I/O resource is sufficient.

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