Espresso: Brewing Java For More Non-Volatility with Non-volatile Memory

TL;DR

Espresso is a comprehensive extension to Java and its runtime that enables efficient, crash-consistent persistence of Java objects in non-volatile memory, improving performance over existing solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a persistent heap design and a new persistent object abstraction to simplify and optimize Java programming with non-volatile memory.

Findings

Espresso outperforms state-of-the-art NVM support for Java in performance.

It maintains compatibility with existing Java data structures.

Provides crash consistency for persistent Java objects.

Abstract

Fast, byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) embraces both near-DRAM latency and disk-like persistence, which has generated considerable interests to revolutionize system software stack and programming models. However, it is less understood how NVM can be combined with managed runtime like Java virtual machine (JVM) to ease persistence management. This paper proposes Espresso, a holistic extension to Java and its runtime, to enable Java programmers to exploit NVM for persistence management with high performance. Espresso first provides a general persistent heap design called Persistent Java Heap (PJH) to manage persistent data as normal Java objects. The heap is then strengthened with a recoverable mechanism to provide crash consistency for heap metadata. It then provides a new abstraction called Persistent Java Object (PJO) to provide an easy-to-use but safe persistent programming model for programmers to persist application data. The evaluation confirms that Espresso significantly outperforms state-of-art NVM support for Java (i.e., JPA and PCJ) while being compatible to existing data structures in Java programs.