AstriFlash A Flash-Based System for Online Services

• Published in: Proceedings - International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture pp. 81 - 93
• Main Authors: Gupta, Siddharth, Oh, Yunho, Yan, Lei, Sutherland, Mark, Bhattacharjee, Abhishek, Falsafi, Babak, Hsu, Peter
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Costs; Memory management; Random access memory; Servers; Switches; Tail; Throughput
• DOI: 10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10070955

Modern datacenters host datasets in DRAM to offer large-scale online services with tight tail-latency requirements. Unfortunately, as DRAM is expensive and increasingly difficult to scale, datacenter operators are forced to consider denser storage technologies. While modern flash-based storage exhibits μs-scale access latency, which is well within the tail-latency constraints of many online services, traditional demand paging abstraction used to manage memory and storage incurs high overheads and prohibits flash usage in online services. We introduce AstriFlash, a hardware-software co-design that tightly integrates flash and DRAM with ns-scale overheads. Our evaluation of server workloads with cycle-accurate full-system simulation shows that AstriFlash achieves 95% of a DRAM-only system's throughput while maintaining the required 99th-percentile tail latency and reducing the memory cost by 20x.