Basic Performance Measurements of the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module
Joseph Izraelevitz, Jian Yang, Lu Zhang, Juno Kim, Xiao Liu, Amirsaman, Memaripour, Yun Joon Soh, Zixuan Wang, Yi Xu, Subramanya R. Dulloor, Jishen, Zhao, Steven Swanson

TL;DR
This paper provides a comprehensive performance analysis of Intel's Optane DC Persistent Memory Module, highlighting its capabilities, limitations, and benefits for various applications and system configurations.
Contribution
It offers the first detailed scholarly evaluation of Optane DC PMM's performance as main memory and persistent storage, including benchmarks and practical application insights.
Findings
Optane DC PMMs can serve as large memory with DRAM cache, minimally impacting small-memory applications.
Using Optane DC in file system mode can significantly improve performance with optimized load/store interfaces.
User-space persistence with Optane DC often outperforms file system-based persistence, nearly doubling application speed.
Abstract
Scalable nonvolatile memory DIMMs will finally be commercially available with the release of the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (or just "Optane DC PMM"). This new nonvolatile DIMM supports byte-granularity accesses with access times on the order of DRAM, while also providing data storage that survives power outages. This work comprises the first in-depth, scholarly, performance review of Intel's Optane DC PMM, exploring its capabilities as a main memory device, and as persistent, byte-addressable memory exposed to user-space applications. This report details the technologies performance under a number of modes and scenarios, and across a wide variety of macro-scale benchmarks. Optane DC PMMs can be used as large memory devices with a DRAM cache to hide their lower bandwidth and higher latency. When used in this Memory (or cached) mode, Optane DC memory has little impact on…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Advanced Data Storage Technologies · Distributed systems and fault tolerance
