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CoPA: Cold page awakening to overcome retention failures in STT-MRAM Based I/O Buffers

Hadizadeh, M ; Sharif University of Technology | 2022

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2021.3137315
  3. Publisher: IEEE Computer Society , 2022
  4. Abstract:
  5. Performance and reliability are two prominent factors in the design of data storage systems. To achieve higher performance, recently storage system designers use DynamicDynamic RAMRAM (DRAM)-based buffers. The volatility of DRAM brings up the possibility of data loss and data inconsistency. Thus, a part of the main storage is conventionally used as the journal area to be able of recovering unflushed data pages in the case of power failure. Moreover, periodically flushing buffered data pages to the main storage is a common mechanism to preserve a high level of reliability. This scheme, however, leads to a considerable increase in storage write traffic, which adversely affects the performance. To address this shortcoming, recent studies offer a small Non-VolatileNon-Volatile MemoryMemory (NVM) as the PersistentPersistent JournalJournal AreaArea (PJA) along with DRAM as an efficient approach to overcome DRAM vulnerability against power failure while effectively reducing storage write traffic. This approach, named NVM-BackedNVM-Backed BufferBuffer (NVB-Buffer), features from advantages of NVMs and addresses DRAM shortcomings. In this article, we employ the most promising technologies for PJA among the emerging technologies, which is Spin-TransferSpin-Transfer TorqueTorque MagneticMagnetic RandomRandom AccessAccess MemoryMemory (STT-MRAM) to meet the requirements of efficient PJA by providing high endurance, non-volatility, and DRAM-like latency. Despite these advantages, STT-MRAM faces major reliability challenges, i.e., Retention Failure, Read Disturbance, and Write Failure, which have not been addressed in previously suggested NVB-Buffers. In this article, we first demonstrate that the retention failure is the dominant source of errors in NVB-Buffers as it suffers from long and unpredictable page idle intervals (i.e., the time interval between two consecutive accesses to a PJA page). Then, we propose a novel NVB-Buffer management scheme, named, ColdCo̲ld PageP̲age AwakeningA̲wakening (CoPA), which predictably reduces the idle time of PJA pages. To this aim, CoPA employs DistantDistant RefreshingRefreshing to periodically overwrite the vulnerable PJA page contents by opportunistically using their replica in DRAM-based buffer. We compare CoPA with the state-of-the-art schemes over several well-known storage workloads based on physical journaling. Our evaluations show that CoPA significantly reduces the maximum page idle time, which leads to three orders of magnitude lower failure rate with negligible performance degradation (1.1%) and memory overhead (1.2%). © 1990-2012 IEEE
  6. Keywords:
  7. STT-MRAM ; Failure rate ; Ferroelectric RAM ; Magnetic recording ; MRAM devices ; Nonvolatile storage ; Data storage systems ; Magnetic random access memory ; Magnetic tunneling ; Non-volatile memory ; Nonvolatile memory ; Persistent journal area ; Random access memory ; Retention failure ; Spin transfer torque ; Spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory ; Dynamic random access storage
  8. Source: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ; Volume 33, Issue 10 , 2022 , Pages 2304-2317 ; 10459219 (ISSN)
  9. URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9662259