Author:
Shuichi Oikawa
Affiliation:
University of Tsukuba, Japan
Keyword(s):
Non-volatile Memory, Operating Systems, Storage, Big Data Processing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Big Data Cloud Services
;
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Computing Enabling Technology
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Programming Models, Systems, and Fault-Tolerant Computing
Abstract:
Cloud computing environments for big data processing require high performance storage. There are emerging high performance memory storage technologies, such as next generation non-volatile (NV) memory and battery backed NV-DIMM. While their performance is much higher than the current block storage devices, such as SSDs and HDDs, they provides only limited capacity. Such limited capacity makes it difficult for memory storage to be adapted as mass storage, and their uses in cloud computing environments have been severely limited. This paper proposes a method that combines memory storage with block storage. It makes use of memory storage as cache of block storage in order to remove the capacity limitation of memory storage. The proposed method inherits the high performance of memory storage and also the large capacity of block storage. Therefore, memory storage can be transparently used as a part of mass storage while its low overhead access can accelerate storage performance. The propo
sed method was implemented as a device driver of the Linux kernel. Its performance evaluation shows that it outperforms a bare SSD drive and achieves better performance on the Hadoop and database environments.
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