skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Telomere: Real-Time NAND Flash Storage
Modern solid-state disks achieve high data transfer rates due to their massive internal parallelism. However, out-of-place updates for flash memory incur garbage collection costs when valid data needs to be copied during space reclamation. The root cause of this extra cost is that solid-state disks are not always able to accurately determine data lifetime and group together data that expires before the space needs to be reclaimed. Real-time systems found in autonomous vehicles, industrial control systems, and assembly-line robots store data from hundreds of sensors and often have predictable data lifetimes. These systems require guaranteed high storage bandwidth for read and write operations by mission-critical real-time tasks. In this article, we depart from the traditional block device interface to guarantee the high throughput needed to process large volumes of data. Using data lifetime information from the application layer, our proposed real-time design, called Telomere , is able to intelligently lay out data in NAND flash memory and eliminate valid page copies during garbage collection. Telomere’s real-time admission control is able to guarantee tasks their required read and write operations within their periods. Under randomly generated tasksets containing 500 tasks, Telomere achieves 30% higher throughput with a 5% storage cost compared to pre-existing techniques.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1850202 2007707
PAR ID:
10342155
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Volume:
21
Issue:
1
ISSN:
1539-9087
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 24
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Log-based data management systems use storage as if it were an append-only medium, transforming random writes into sequential writes, which delivers significant benefits when logs are persisted on hard disks. Although solid-state drives (SSDs) offer improved random write capabilities, sequential writes continue to be advan- tageous due to locality and space efficiency. However, the inherent properties of flash-based SSDs induce major disadvantages when used with a random write block interface, causing write amplifica- tion, uneven wear, log stacking, and garbage collection overheads. To eliminate these disadvantages, Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs have recently been introduced. They offer increased capacity, re- duced write amplification, and open up data placement and garbage collection to the host through zones, which have sequential-write semantics and must be explicitly reset. We explain how the new ZNS Zone Append primitive, which sup- ports pushing fine-grained data placement onto the device, along with our proposal for “Group Append”, which enables sub-block sized appends, could benefit log-structured data management sys- tems. We explore advantages of ZNS SSDs with Zone Append, Group Append, and computational storage in four log-based data management areas: (i) log-based file systems, (ii) LSM trees such as RocksDB, (iii) database systems, and (iv) event logs/shared logs. Furthermore, we propose research directions for each of these data management systems using ZNS SSDs. 
    more » « less
  2. Flash memory has been used extensively as external storage of smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, laptops, etc. Therefore, more and more sensitive or even mission critical data are stored in flash and, once the data turn obsolete, securely deleting them is necessary for both regulation compliance and privacy protection. Traditional secure deletion on flash memory mainly focuses on sanitizing data. However, unique nature of flash memory may cause various data ``remnants'' and, even though the data are removed, the remnants may be utilized by the adversary to recover the deleted data, compromising the secure deletion guarantee. Based on both theoretic analysis and experiments using real-world workloads, we have identified one common type of remnants in the flash memory, namely duplicates, which are caused by unique internal functions of flash storage media including garbage collection, wear leveling, bad block management. We propose RedFlash, a novel secure deletion scheme which can efficiently Remove both the data and the corresponding duplicates towards secure deletion on Flash memory. Security analysis and experimental evaluation show that RedFlash can ensure the secure deletion guarantee, at the cost of a small performance degradation, compared to a regular (non-secure) flash controller. 
    more » « less
  3. Flash caches are used to reduce peak backend load for throughput-constrained data center services, reducing the total number of backend servers required. Bulk storage systems are a large-scale example, backed by high-capacity but low-throughput hard disks, and using flash caches to provide a more cost-effective storage layer underlying everything from blobstores to data warehouses. However, flash caches must address the limited write endurance of flash by limiting the long-term average flash write rate to avoid premature wearout. To do so, most flash caches must use admission policies to filter cache insertions and maximize the workload-reduction value of each flash write. The Baleen flash cache uses coordinated ML admission and prefetching to reduce peak backend load. After learning painful lessons with our early ML policy attempts, we exploit a new cache residency model (which we call episodes) to guide model training. We focus on optimizing for an end-to-end system metric (Disk-head Time) that measures backend load more accurately than IO miss rate or byte miss rate. Evaluation using Meta traces from seven storage clusters shows that Baleen reduces Peak Disk-head Time (and hence the number of backend hard disks required) by 12% over state-of-the-art policies for a fixed flash write rate constraint. Baleen-TCO, which chooses an optimal flash write rate, reduces our estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) by 17%. Code and traces are available at https://www.pdl.cmu.edu/CILES/. 
    more » « less
  4. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) may be combined with conventional (re-writable) recording on the same drive; in host-managed drives shipping today this capability is used to provide a small number of re-writable zones, typically totaling a few tens of GB. Although these re-writable zones are widely used by SMR-aware applications, the literature to date has ignored them and focused on fully-shingled devices. We describe μCache, an SMR translation layer (STL) using re-writable (mutable) zones to take advantage of both workload spatial and temporal locality to reduce the garbage collection overhead resulted from out-of-place writes. In μCache the volume LBA space is divided into fixed -sized buckets and, on write access, the corresponding bucket is copied (promoted) to the re-writable zones, allowing subsequent writes to the same bucket be served in - place resulting in fewer garbage collection cycles. We evaluate μCache in simulation against real-world traces and show that with appropriate parameters it is able to hold the entire write working set of most workloads in re-writable storage, virtually eliminating garbage collection overhead. We also emulate μCache by replaying its translated traces against actual drive and show that 1) it outperforms its examined counterpart, an E-region based translation approach on average by 2x and up to 5.1x, and 2) it incurs additional latency only for a small fraction of write operations, (up to 10%) when compared with conventional non-shingled disks. 
    more » « less
  5. Flash-based storage is replacing disk for an increasing number of data center applications, providing orders of magnitude higher throughput and lower average latency. However, applications also require predictable storage latency. Existing Flash devices fail to provide low tail read latency in the presence of write operations. We propose two novel techniques to address SSD read tail latency, including Redundant Array of Independent LUNs (RAIL) which avoids serialization of reads behind user writes as well as latency-aware hot-cold separation (HC) which improves write throughput while maintaining low tail latency. RAIL leverages the internal parallelism of modern Flash devices and allocates data and parity pages to avoid reads getting stuck behind writes. We implement RAIL in the Linux Kernel as part of the LightNVM Flash translation layer and show that it can reduce read tail latency by 7× at the 99.99th percentile, while reducing relative bandwidth by only 33%. 
    more » « less