On using network RAM as a non-volatile buffer

  • Authors:

  • Dionisios Pnevmatikatos;Evangelos P. Markatos;Grigorios Magklis;Sotiris Ioannidis

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas (FORTH), P.O. Box 1385, GR-711 10 Heraklion, Crete, Greece;Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas (FORTH), P.O. Box 1385, GR-711 10 Heraklion, Crete, Greece;Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas (FORTH), P.O. Box 1385, GR-711 10 Heraklion, Crete, Greece;Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas (FORTH), P.O. Box 1385, GR-711 10 Heraklion, Crete, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

File systems and databases usually make several synchronous disk write accesses in order to make sure that the disk always has a consistent view of their data, so that it can be recovered in the case of a system crash. Since synchronous disk operations are slow, some systems choose to employ asynchronous disk write operations that improve performance at the cost of low reliability: in case of a system crash all data that have not yet been written to disk are lost. In this paper we describe a software-based Non-Volatile RAM system that achieves the high performance of asynchronous write operations without sacrificing the reliability of synchronous write operations. Our system takes a set of volatile main memories residing in independent workstations and transforms it into a non-volatile memory buffer – much like RAIDS do with magnetic disks. It then uses this non-volatile buffer as an intermediate storage space in order to acknowledge synchronous write operations before actually writing the data to magnetic disk, but after writing the data to (intermediate) stable storage. We demonstrate the performance advantages of our system using both simulation and experimental evaluation.