Bridging the New Memory Technologies with Computer Systems
Talk, Nanjing University, Department of Computer Science, Nanjing, China
Nowadays, the memory and storage systems have experienced significant technology shifts. Such technology promotions have motivated researchers to re-think and re-design the existing system organization and hardware architecture. This talk mainly shares our research experience of building up the connection between the existing computer hardware/software and the new memory/storage technologies, including the emerging non-volatile memory and the new types of NAND flash media. For example, the emerging Z-NAND flash exhibits a high memory density, retains a long lifetime and reduces the flash access latency from hundreds of microseconds to only a few microseconds, which becomes a promising candidate to replace the traditional DRAM. I will firstly introduce the research with the system-level characterization of the Z-NAND flash. I will explain our research efforts to make the existing server storage stack (from kernel to firmware) adaptive to the new flash technology. In addition, I will further shows how the new flash technology can change the current computer architecture to satisfy various demands.