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Title: Preemptible I/O Scheduling of Garbage Collection for Solid State Drives

Journal Article · · IEEE Transations on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [2];  [1]
  1. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States). School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Unlike hard disks, flash devices use out-of-place updates operations and require a garbage collection (GC) process to reclaim invalid pages to create free blocks. This GC process is a major cause of performance degradation when running concurrently with other I/O operations as internal bandwidth is consumed to reclaim these invalid pages. The invocation of the GC process is generally governed by a low watermark on free blocks and other internal device metrics that different workloads meet at different intervals. This results in an I/O performance that is highly dependent on workload characteristics. In this paper, we examine the GC process and propose a semipreemptible GC (PGC) scheme that allows GC processing to be preempted while pending I/O requests in the queue are serviced. Moreover, we further enhance flash performance by pipelining internal GC operations and merge them with pending I/O requests whenever possible. Our experimental evaluation of this semi-PGC scheme with realistic workloads demonstrates both improved performance and reduced performance variability. Write-dominant workloads show up to a 66.56% improvement in average response time with a 83.30% reduced variance in response time compared to the non-PGC scheme. In addition, we explore opportunities of a new NAND flash device that supports suspend/resume commands for read, write, and erase operations for fully PGC (F-PGC). Our experiments with an F-PGC enabled flash device show that request response time can be improved by up to 14.57% compared to semi-PGC.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1565074
Journal Information:
IEEE Transations on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 32, Issue 2; ISSN 0278-0070
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 44 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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