Persistent Memory I/O Primitives

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of persistent memory technologies like Intel Optane DC, providing insights into bandwidth and latency, and introduces optimized I/O primitives for efficient use in database systems.

Contribution

It offers one of the first comprehensive performance evaluations of PMem and develops guidelines and primitives for its efficient utilization.

Findings

PMem offers high bandwidth and low latency compared to traditional storage.

Guidelines for effective PMem usage are proposed.

Two optimized I/O primitives for PMem are introduced.

Abstract

I/O latency and throughput is one of the major performance bottlenecks for disk-based database systems. Upcoming persistent memory (PMem) technologies, like Intel's Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules, promise to bridge the gap between NAND-based flash (SSD) and DRAM, and thus eliminate the I/O bottleneck. In this paper, we provide one of the first performance evaluations of PMem in terms of bandwidth and latency. Based on the results, we develop guidelines for efficient PMem usage and two essential I/O primitives tuned for PMem: log writing and block flushing.