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The emergence of Intel's Optane DC persistent memory (Optane Pmem) draws much interest in building persistent key-value (KV) stores to take advantage of its high throughput and low latency. A major challenge in the efforts stems from the fact that Optane Pmem is essentially a hybrid storage device with two distinct properties. On one hand, it is a high-speed byte-addressable device similar to DRAM. On the other hand, the write to the Optane media is conducted at the unit of 256 bytes, much like a block storage device. Existing KV store designs for persistent memory do not take into account of the latter property, leading to high write amplification and constraining both write and read throughput. In the meantime, a direct re-use of a KV store design intended for block devices, such as LSM-based ones, would cause much higher read latency due to the former property. In this paper, we propose ChameleonDB, a KV store design specifically for this important hybrid memory/storage device by considering and exploiting these two properties in one design. It uses LSM tree structure to efficiently admit writes with low write amplification. It uses an in-DRAM hash table to bypass LSM-tree's multiple levels for fast reads. In the meantime, ChameleonDB may choose to opportunistically maintain the LSM multi-level structure in the background to achieve short recovery time after a system crash. ChameleonDB's hybrid structure is designed to be able to absorb sudden bursts of a write workload, which helps avoid long-tail read latency. Our experiment results show that ChameleonDB improves write throughput by 3.3× and reduces read latency by around 60% compared with a legacy LSM-tree based KV store design. ChameleonDB provides performance competitive even with KV stores using fully in-DRAM index by using much less DRAM space. Compared with CCEH, a persistent hash table design, ChameleonDB provides 6.4× higher write throughput. 

In this paper we leverage the existence of a property in the duplicate data, named duplicate locality, that reveals the fact that multiple duplicate chunks are likely to occur together. In other words, one duplicate chunk is likely to be immediately followed by a sequence of contiguous duplicate chunks. The longer the sequence, the stronger the locality is. After a quantitative analysis of duplicate locality in real-world data, we propose a suite of chunking techniques that exploit the locality to remove almost all chunking cost for deduplicatable chunks in CDC-based deduplication systems. The resulting deduplication method, named RapidCDC, has two salient features. One is that its efficiency is positively correlated to the deduplication ratio. RapidCDC can be as fast as a fixed-size chunking method when applied on data sets with high data redundancy. The other feature is that its high efficiency does not rely on high duplicate locality strength. These attractive features make RapidCDC’s effectiveness almost guaranteed for datasets with high deduplication ratio. Our experimental results with synthetic and real-world datasets show that RapidCDC’s chunking speedup can be up to 33× higher than regular CDC. Meanwhile, it maintains (nearly) the same deduplication ratio. 

CPU cache has been used to bridge the processor-memory performance gap to enable high-performance computing. As the cache is of limited capacity, for its maximum efficacy it should (1) avoid caching data that are less likely to be accessed and (2) identify and cache data that would otherwise cost a program multiple memory accesses to reach. Unfortunately, existing cache architectures are inadequate on these two efforts. First, to cost-effectively exploit the spatial locality, they adopt a relatively large and fixed-size cache line as the caching unit. Thus, much of the space in a cache line can be wasted when the data locality is weak. Second, for easy use, the cache is designed to be transparent to programs, which hinders programs from fully exploiting its performance potentials. To address these problems, we propose a high-performance Software Defined Cache (SDC) architecture providing a simple and generic key-value abstraction that allows (1) caching data at a granularity smaller than a cache line, and (2) enabling programs to explicitly insert, retrieve, and invalidate data in the cache with new instructions. By providing a program with the ability of explicitly using the cache as a lookaside key-value buffer, SDC enables a much more efficient cache without disruptively changing the existing cache organization and without substantially increasing hardware cost. We have prototyped SDC on the gem5 simulator and evaluated it with various data index structures and workloads. Experiment results show that SDC can improve the cache performance for the workloads by up to 5.3× over current cache design. 

Data deduplication has been widely used in storage systems to improve storage efficiency and I/O performance. In particular, content-defined variable-size chunking (CDC) is often used in data deduplication systems for its capability to detect and remove duplicate data in modified files. However, the CDC algorithm is very compute-intensive and inherently sequential. Efforts on accelerating it by segmenting a file and running the algorithm independently on each segment in parallel come at a cost of substantial degradation of deduplication ratio. In this paper, we propose SS-CDC, a two-stage parallel CDC, that enables (almost) full parallelism on chunking of a file without compromising deduplication ratio. Further, SS-CDC exploits instruction-level SIMD parallelism available in today's processors. As a case study, by using Intel AVX-512 instructions, SS-CDC consistently obtains superlinear speedups on a multi-core server. Our experiments using real-world datasets show that, compared to existing parallel CDC methods which only achieve up to a 7.7X speedup on an 8-core processor with the deduplication ratio degraded by up to 40%, SS-CDC can achieve up to a 25.6X speedup with no loss of deduplication ratio. 

In-memory data management systems, such as key-value stores, have become an essential infrastructure in today's big-data processing and cloud computing. They rely on efficient index structures to access data. While unordered indexes, such as hash tables, can perform point search with O(1) time, they cannot be used in many scenarios where range queries must be supported. Many ordered indexes, such as B+ tree and skip list, have a O(log N) lookup cost, where N is number of keys in an index. For an ordered index hosting billions of keys, it may take more than 30 key-comparisons in a lookup, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than that on a hash table. With availability of large memory and fast network in today's data centers, this O(log N) time is taking a heavy toll on applications that rely on ordered indexes. In this paper we introduce a new ordered index structure, named Wormhole, that takes O(log L) worst-case time for looking up a key with a length of L. The low cost is achieved by simultaneously leveraging strengths of three indexing structures, namely hash table, prefix tree, and B+ tree, to orchestrate a single fast ordered index. Wormhole's range operations can be performed by a linear scan of a list after an initial lookup. This improvement of access efficiency does not come at a price of compromised space efficiency. Instead, Wormhole's index space is comparable to those of B+ tree and skip list. Experiment results show that Wormhole outperforms skip list, B+ tree, ART, and Masstree by up to 8.4x, 4.9x, 4.3x, and 6.6x in terms of key lookup throughput, respectively.