I/O-Cache: A Non-volatile Memory Based Buffer Cache Policy to Improve Storage Performance

Most computer systems currently consist of DRAM as main memory and hard disk drives (HDDs) as storage devices. Due to the volatile nature of DRAM, the main memory may suffer from data loss in the event of power failures or system crashes. With rapid development of new types of non-volatile memory (NVRAM), such as PCM, Memristor, and STT-RAM, it becomes likely that one of these technologies will replace DRAM as main memory in the not-too-distant future. In an NVRAM based buffer cache, any updated pages can be kept longer without the urgency to be flushed to HDDs. This opens opportunities for designing new buffer cache policies that can achieve better storage performance. However, it is challenging to design a policy that can also increase the cache hit ratio. In this paper, we propose a buffer cache policy, named I/O-Cache, that regroups and synchronizes long sets of consecutive dirty pages to take advantage of HDDs' fast sequential access speed and the non-volatile property of NVRAM. In addition, our new policy can dynamically separate the whole cache into a dirty cache and a clean cache, according to the characteristics of the workload, to decrease storage writes. We evaluate our scheme with various traces. The experimental results show that I/O-Cache shortens I/O completion time, decreases the number of I/O requests, and improves the cache hit ratio compared with existing cache policies.