SAWL:A Self-adaptive Wear-leveling NVM Scheme for High Performance Storage Systems

Abstract: In order to meet the needs of high performance computing (HPC) in terms of large memory, high throughput and energy savings, the non-volatile memory (NVM) has been widely studied due to its salient features of high density, near-zero standby power, byte-addressable and non-volatile properties. In HPC systems, the multi-level cell (MLC) technique is used to significantly increase device density and decrease the cost, which however leads to much weaker endurance than the single-level cell (SLC) counterpart. Although wear-leveling techniques can mitigate this weakness in MLC, the improvements upon MLC-based NVM become very limited due to not achieving uniform write distribution before some cells are really worn out. To address this problem, our paper proposes a self-adaptive wear-leveling (SAWL) scheme for MLC-based NVM. The idea behind SAWL is to dynamically tune the wear-leveling granularities and balance the writes across the cells of entire memory, thus achieving suitable tradeoff between the lifetime and cache hit rate. Moreover, to reduce the size of the address-mapping table, SAWL maintains a few recently-accessed mappings in a small on-chip cache. Experimental results demonstrate that SAWL significantly improves the NVM lifetime and the performance for HPC systems, compared with state-of-the-art schemes.