Janus: optimizing memory and storage support for non-volatile memory systems

Non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies can manipulate persistent data directly in memory. Ensuring crash consistency of persistent data enforces that data updates reach all the way to NVM, which puts these write requests on the critical path. Recent literature sought to reduce this performance impact. However, prior works have not fully accounted for all the backend memory operations (BMOs) performed at the memory controller that are necessary to maintain persistent data in NVM. These BMOs include support for encryption, integrity protection, compression, deduplication, etc., necessary to provide security, endurance, and lifetime guarantees. These BMOs significantly increase the NVM write latency and exacerbate the performance degradation caused by the critical write requests. The goal of this work is to minimize the BMO overhead of write requests in an NVM system.

The central challenge is to figure out how to optimize these seemingly dependent and monolithic BMOs. Our key insight is to decompose each BMO into a series of sub-operations and then reduce their overall latency through two mechanisms: (i) parallelize sub-operations across BMOs and (ii) pre-execute sub-operations off the critical path as soon as their inputs are ready. We expose a generic software interface that can be used to issue pre-execution requests compatible with common crash-consistency programming models and various BMOs. Based on these ideas, we propose Janus¹ - a hardware-software co-design that parallelizes and pre-executes BMOs in an NVM system. We evaluate Janus in an NVM system that integrates encryption, integrity verification, and deduplication and issues pre-execution requests through the proposed software interface, either manually or using an automated compiler pass. Compared to a system that performs these operations serially, Janus achieves 2.35× and 2.00× speedup using manual and automated instrumentation, respectively.