NSF-BSF: SHF: CCF: Small: Collaborative Research: Hardware/Software Design of Durable Data Structures and Algorithms for Non-Volatile Main Memory

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Memory is said to be non-volatile if it does not lose its contents when it loses power (i.e., crashes). Hardware for non-volatile memory is advancing fast, and soon it is expected to displace volatile DRAM for main memory in many architectures. This project entails developing concurrent data structures and software that can exploit emerging forms of non-volatile memory that provide simple, faster, and more energy-efficient crash recovery. This research has the potential to benefit society by enhancing the robustness and fault-tolerance of systems on which modern society increasingly depends. The results of this research may also significantly improve energy-efficiency, since such systems would require smaller caches and fewer accesses to energy-hungry secondary storage devices. New curriculum development activities are also planned as part of this project. This project investigates how to make common data structures, such as queues, skip-lists, hash maps, and others, durable. Different levels of durability are considered, with special emphasis on high performance and ease of programming. The project also evaluates several memory architectures, including both conventional multilevel memory and emerging near-data processing architectures. A complementary effort investigates hardware primitives needed to flush caches, and to move data between volatile and non-volatile memory regions. Building on these efforts, the project will produce a collection of performance and energy-efficient durable concurrent data structures, packaged as software libraries that allow for easy adaptation by programmers. Evaluation will be done on synthetic benchmarks as well as concurrent applications such as concurrent key-value stores, work-stealing schedulers, and concurrent memory management. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.