NAND flash memory-based hybrid file system for high I/O performance

As the performance potentials of SSD (Solid State Device) have been recognized, adopting SSD to IT products as HDD replacements is rapidly increasing. Since SSD is organized into multiple flash memory packages, it deploys peculiar device characteristics that do not occur in HDD, such as block-unit erasure overhead. Also, its high cost per capacity is the main obstacle to building a large-scale storage subsystem with only SSDs. An alternative is to build a hybrid storage subsystem where a small portion of SSDs are integrated with HDDs so as to utilize SSD’s performance advantages in a cost-effective way. This study introduces a new form of file system, called N-hybrid (New-Form of hybrid file system), that enables us to support the hybrid device structure combined with both HDD and SSD. Our primary objectives in developing N-hybrid are to provide better I/O bandwidth by exploiting the characteristics of HDD and SSD and to provide a flexible data layout maximizing the usage of tight SSD storage resources. Several experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness and suitability of N-hybrid.     

基于SSD的机群文件系统元数据存储系统

随着数据量的增加和元数据操作性能需求的提高,传统基于磁盘(HDD)存储架构的机群文件系统元数据存储系统由于HDD成为性能瓶颈而无法满足需求.将SSD应用到元数据存储中,设计实现了一个基于SSD+HDD的异构元数据存储系统Hybrid MDSL.针对SSD的I/O特性设计了基于追加写的元数据存储组织,并通过基于访问热度的数据迁移机制提高SSD空间利用率.测试结果表明,Hybrid MDSL明显提高了元数据I/O的性能.     

一种面向SSD-HDD混合存储的热区跟踪替换算法

固态驱动器(SSD)读写性能优越,但成本高,因此在实践中人们往往利用SSD和普通硬盘(HDD)构建混合存储系统以获取较高的性价比.在混合存储系统中,如何使更多的IO请求能够命中SSD是充分利用SSD性能的关键.针对多任务共享存储环境下集中访问和随机访问IO存取模式并存,且通常情况下IO工作流大部分请求相对集中于有限区域内的特点,本文提出一种基于热区跟踪(HZT)的缓存替换算法.HZT算法充分考虑了IO工作流的空间局部性和时间局部性,利用IO工作流的历史访问信息,跟踪当前热区,并为热区数据块赋予更高的驻留SSD的优先级,能够有效提高混合存储中SSD缓存的命中率.经测试,在典型多任务共享存储环境下HZT算法可以使SSD缓存的命中率比使用LRU(Least Recently Used)算法的系统提高12%.采用适当的预取策略,该算法的命中率与LRU算法相比可获得23%的提升.     

Vertical partitioning for flash and HDD database systems

Recent advances in flash memory technology have greatly enhanced the capability of flash memory to address the I/O bottleneck problem. Flash memory has exceptional I/O performance compared to the hard disk drive (HDD). The superiority of flash memory is especially visible when dealing with random read patterns. Even though the cost of flash memory is higher than that of HDD storage, the popularity of flash memory is increasing at such a pace that it is becoming a common addition to the average computer. Recently, flash memory has been made into larger devices called solid state drives (SSDs). Although these devices can offer capacities comparable to HDDs, they are considerably more expensive per byte.Our research aims to increase the I/O performance of database systems by using a small amount of flash memory alongside HDD storage. The system uses a fully vertically partitioned storage structure where each column is stored separately on either the HDD or SSD. Our approach is to assign the columns into the SSD which will benefit the most from the characteristics of flash memory. We prove this problem is NP-complete and propose an optimal dynamic programming solution and a faster greedy heuristic solution.A system simulator has been implemented and experiments show that the overall I/O costs can be greatly reduced using only a limited amount of flash memory. The results show the greedy heuristic solution performed similarly to the more expensive dynamic programming solution for the situations tested.     

基于磁盘和固态硬盘的混合存储系统研究综述

大数据和云计算环境下海量增长的数据对存储系统的超高容量和体系结构带来了极大的挑战。目前存储系统的发展趋向于大容量、低成本和高性能,然而任何单一的存储器件如传统的机械磁盘（HDD）、固态硬盘（SSD）、非易失型性随机存储器等由于其固有的物理特性的限制,并不能满足以上的需求。将不同的存储介质混合组合成高效的存储系统是一个好的解决方法,固态硬盘作为一种高可靠性、低能耗、高性能的存储器被越来越广泛地运用到混合存储系统。通过将固态硬盘与传统磁盘进行组合,利用固态硬盘的高性能和传统磁盘低成本大容量的特点,能够为用户提供大容量的存储空间,保证系统的高性能,同时还能降低成本。通过阐述SSD与HDD混合存储系统的研究现状,对不同的SSD与HDD混合存储系统进行分类总结;然后针对缓存架构和设备同层架构这两种目前最流行的存储架构中涉及到的关键技术和不足进行讨论;最后对基于SSD和HDD的混合存储技术进行概括总结,并对今后该领域的研究重点和方向进行展望。     

Sub-Join:面向闪存数据库的查询优化算法

固态硬盘具有高速的随机读取速度、低功耗、体积小等特点,被认为将取代磁盘成为新一代的数据存储设备。但是闪存数据库的查询性能的提高却远小于固态硬盘相比于磁盘I/O性能的提高,其原因在于现有的数据库是基于磁盘设计的,不能充分发挥固态硬盘的高速性能。提出一种名为子连接(Sub-Join)的连接算法。首先将数据表的连接列和主键投影为新的子表,然后对子表进行接连操作,最后根据子表的连接结果再从原始数据表中回取查询结果。通过和开源数据库Oracle Berkeley DB的比较实验,结果表明子连接算法比原有算法的性能提高了40%～100%,充分说明了它的优越性。     

Chameleon: A High Performance Flash/FRAM Hybrid Solid State Disk Architecture

Flash memory solid state disk (SSD) is gaining popularity and replacing hard disk drive (HDD) in mobile computing systems such as ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs) and notebook PCs because of lower power consumption, faster random access, and higher shock resistance. One of the key challenges in designing a high-performance flash memory SSD is an efficient handling of small random writes to non-volatile data whose performance suffers from the inherent limitation of flash memory that prohibits in-place update. In this paper, we propose a high performance Flash/FRAM hybrid SSD architecture called Chameleon. In Chameleon, metadata used by the flash translation layer (FTL), a software layer in the flash memory SSD, is maintained in a small FRAM since this metadata is a target of intensive small random writes, whereas the bulk data is kept in the flash memory. Performance evaluation based on an FPGA implementation of the Chameleon architecture shows that the use of FRAM in Chameleon improves the performance by 21.3%. The results also show that even for bulk data that cannot be maintained in FRAM because of the size limitation, the use of fine-grained write buffering is critically important because of the inability of flash memory to perform in-place update.     

Improving Application Launch Performance on Solid State Drives

Application launch performance is of great importance to system platform developers and vendors as it greatly affects the degree of users’ satisfaction.The single most effective way to improve application launch performance is to replace a hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD),which has recently become affordable and popular.A natural question is then whether or not to replace the traditional HDD-aware application launchers with a new SSD-aware optimizer.We address this question by analyzing the inefficiency of the HDD-aware application launchers on SSDs and then proposing a new SSD-aware application prefetching scheme,called the Fast Application STarter (FAST).The key idea of FAST is to overlap the computation (CPU) time with the SSD access (I/O) time during an application launch.FAST is composed of a set of user-level components and system debugging tools provided by Linux OS (operating system).Hence,FAST can be easily deployed in any recent Linux versions without kernel recompilation.We implement FAST on a desktop PC with an SSD running Linux 2.6.32 OS and evaluate it by launching a set of widely-used applications,demonstrating an average of 28% reduction of application launch time as compared to PC without a prefetcher.     

Thermal analysis of helium-filled enterprise disk drive

Enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs) are widely used in high-end storage systems for data center. One of key performance requirements for enterprise HDDs is data access rate, which demands very high rotational speed (e.g. 15 k rpm or more) to permit fast access time. To reach such high speed, the disk spindle motor draws more power to spin and hence the temperature of HDD enclosure increases due to large windage loss. It has been known, temperature rise is one of the most fundamental factors that affect the reliability of the disk drive. In order to develop high reliable enterprise HDDs, thermal management of enterprise HDDs needs to be optimized to improve heat dissipation. One possible approach is to fill disk drive with helium because of its lower density and higher thermal conductivity. This paper investigates thermal performances of helium-filled enterprise disk drives through FEM simulations with experimental validations. Windage loss and heat convection of the HDD filled with helium and air are analysed. The simulated and measured temperature distributions of one commercial enterprise HDD with helium-filled and helium-air mixture are compared with those of an air-filled one. The results show 41% reduction of temperature rise of HDD enclosure can be achieved by filling with helium in comparison with that of air-filled HDD. It is also projected that in terms of equivalent cooling capability like air-filled HDD at 15 k rpm, helium-filled HDD spindle can spin up to 19 k rpm, which will greatly increase data access rate by 25% for future enterprise applications.     

一种基于闪存固态硬盘的辅助缓冲池设计

基于磁盘数据库系统的瓶颈主要在磁盘I／O,通常采用缓冲池的设计,将读到的数据页先放入到内存缓冲池后再进行操作。因此,缓存池的大小直接决定了数据库的性能。通过研究基于闪存固态硬盘的特性,提出了一种基于闪存固态硬盘的辅助缓冲池设计。最后,通过修改开源数据库MySQL InnoDB存储引擎,并通过TPC-C实验对比分析了启用辅助缓冲池后数据库的性能可有100％-320％的提高。     

Hybrid storage-based caching strategy for content delivery network services

This study proposes a novel caching scheme for content delivery network services. In general, video content users often watch the first part of video clips and then switch to other content. Therefore, a caching scheme is proposed, in which the first part of the frequently referenced content is stored on a solid state drive (SSD) while the remaining video content is stored on a hard disk drive (HDD),. The proposed hybrid (SSD/HDD) caching scheme offers several benefits, such as an improved average data output capacity due to the high average data rate and average hit capacity of the SSD. That is, performance can be significantly improved at a low extra cost with the cache server of a content delivery network (CDN).     

Towards trustworthy storage using SSDs with proprietary FTL

In recent years we have seen an increasing deployment of flash-based storage, such as SSD, in mission-critical applications due to its fast read/write speed, small form factor, strong shock resistance, etc.. SSDs use a middle layer called flash translation layer (FTL) to maintain the compatibility with the traditional magnetic-based HDDs. Unlike the traditional HDD where the host OS has the knowledge on where and how to access data, SSD uses FTL to translate and implement all operations. Even worse, FTL, which is considered as one of most important intellectual properties of flash-based storage, is often proprietary. This brings up a serious security concern on design trustworthiness when the manufacturer either accidentally or intentionally implements those operations incorrectly or maliciously. We analyze the possible threats that are brought up by the design trust issues, and propose simple yet effective schemes as countermeasures with overhead evaluation.     

基于OpenSSD的闪存转换算法优化

随着信息技术的快速发展,数据存储的需求日益增长,人们对硬盘读写性能的要求越来越高.相比于机械硬盘,固态硬盘可靠性高、能耗低,无寻道时间开销,逐渐取代机械硬盘成为主流的存储介质.但固态硬盘访问数据时需要经过转换,对应的闪存转换算法对读写性能影响很大.OpenSSD项目提供了一个可开发SSD固件的平台,基于此平台本文针对其上的闪存转换算法进行研究并优化,分析了影响I/O读写性能的各类因素,设计出一种适合Cosmos OpenSSD的缓存管理和闪存管理方法,大幅提高了Cosmos OpenSSD的性能.     

HAT: an efficient buffer management method for flash-based hybrid storage systems

Flash solid-state drives (SSDs) provide much faster access to data compared with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). The current price and performance of SSD suggest it can be adopted as a data buffer between main memory and HDD, and buffer management policy in such hybrid systems has attracted more and more interest from research community recently. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to manage the buffer in flash-based hybrid storage systems, named hotness aware hit (HAT). HAT exploits a page reference queue to record the access history as well as the status of accessed pages, i.e., hot, warm, and cold. Additionally, the page reference queue is further split into hot and warm regions which correspond to the memory and flash in general. The HAT approach updates the page status and deals with the page migration in the memory hierarchy according to the current page status and hit position in the page reference queue. Compared with the existing hybrid storage approaches, the proposed HAT can manage the memory and flash cache layers more effectively. Our empirical evaluation on benchmark traces demonstrates the superiority of the proposed strategy against the state-of-the-art competitors.     

Characterizing and optimizing TPC-C workloads on large-scale systems using SSD arrays在大规模系统上优化 TPC-C 评测程序

Transaction processing performance council benchmark C (TPC-C) is the de facto standard for evaluating the performance of high-end computers running on-line transaction processing applications. Differing from other standard benchmarks, the transaction processing performance council only defines specifications for the TPC-C benchmark, but does not provide any standard implementation for end-users. Due to the complexity of the TPC-C workload, it is a challenging task to obtain optimal performance for TPC-C evaluation on a large-scale high-end computer. In this paper, we designed and implemented a large-scale TPC-C evaluation system based on the latest TPC-C specification using solid-state drive (SSD) storage devices. By analyzing the characteristics of the TPC-C workload, we propose a series of system-level optimization methods to improve the TPC-C performance. First, we propose an approach based on SmallFile table space to organize the test data in a round-robin method on all of the disk array partitions; this can make full use of the underlying disk arrays. Second, we propose using a NOOP-based disk scheduling algorithm to reduce the utilization rate of processors and improve the average input/output service time. Third, to improve the system translation lookaside buffer hit rate and reduce the processor overhead, we take advantage of the huge page technique to manage a large amount of memory resources. Lastly, we propose a locality-aware interrupt mapping strategy based on the asymmetry characteristic of non-uniform memory access systems to improve the system performance. Using these optimization methods, we performed the TPC-C test on two large-scale high-end computers using SSD arrays. The experimental results show that our methods can effectively improve the TPC-C performance. For example, the performance of the TPC-C test on an Intel Westmere server reached 1.018 million transactions per minute.     

一种有效的异构盘高能效缓存机制

固态盘具有低功耗、高性能、耐冲击等优势,硬盘具有高容量、低价格等优势.通过改进文件系统的结构,把固态盘和硬盘结合起来,固态盘作为硬盘的大容量缓存,组成一个我们称之为异构盘的异构系统,其性能接近于固态盘,价格却接近于硬盘.同时,在硬盘有足够空闲时长时,使之关闭以减少能耗.针对大容量缓存,我们采用了合适的树形搜索结构,提出...     

面向Lustre文件系统的固态盘存储加速技术研究

磁盘的随机I/O延时制约了存储系统的性能提高,具备高性能随机I/O特性的固态盘(solid state disk,SSD)逐渐成为关注的热点.分析了磁盘、Flash型SSD以及DRAM型SSD三类设备不同的性能特点,讨论了SSD存储加速技术的研究现状,提出了一种面向Lustre文件系统的固态盘存储加速系统架构,介绍和分析了各模块的构成与原理,提出了对象迁移策略.     

Transient dynamic analysis of ferro-fluid bearing spindle motor

 With areal recording density of hard disk drives (HDD) historically growing at an average of 60% per year and fast spindle speed to continue to reduce access time, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain the precise positioning required of the GMR heads to read and write data. Any unexpected vibration will cause the data written to a wrong data track. Consequently, the dynamic behaviors of HDD spindle systems and their potential influences on track misregistration are key issues in disk drive design. With rapid advances in the emerging consumer device market, the fluid bearing spindle motors, which have low NRRO, low acoustic noise and high damping, are being developed as next generation spindles. This paper is to study transient dynamic performance of HDD ferro-fluid bearing spindle systems. The FEA based component mode synthesis method is used to reduce the overall spindle system dimensions. The effect of the unbalanced magnetic pulls (UMP) due to two different types of motor configurations (balanced and unbalanced configurations) on the dynamic behaviors of spindle system was investigated. The simulated results show that the motor with balanced configuration provides better spindle dynamic performance due to absence of UMP. The UMP derived from the unbalanced configuration can result in some frequency resonance interactions and adversely affect the HDD servo-tracking system. Received: 5 July 2001/Accepted: 17 October 2001     

组合盘中结合访问次数与能量代价的文件缓存替换策略

如何有效地降低存储子系统能耗是近几年研究的热点议题。新型非易失、抗震、低功耗闪存及固态盘的出现给存储子系统节能带来了新的机会。但其每单位价格昂贵,目前难以替代硬盘的角色。结合硬盘和固态盘的优势,本文采用组合盘(由硬盘和固态盘组成)节能。结合文件访问次数和能量代价,我们提出了改进的文件缓存替换策略FEBR(Frequency&Energy-based replacement)。实验采用两个真实办公用户数据,结果表明组合盘方案是可行的,节能百分比可达70%～80%;与经典替换算法、最新较好的ARC算法以及理想最优页面OPT算法进行了详细比较,FEBR优于其它策略。     

HybridPlan: a capacity planning technique for projecting storage requirements in hybrid storage systems

Economic forces, driven by the desire to introduce flash into the high-end storage market without changing existing software-base, have resulted in the emergence of solid-state drives (SSDs), flash packaged in HDD form factors and capable of working with device drivers and I/O buses designed for HDDs. Unlike the use of DRAM for caching or buffering, however, certain idiosyncrasies of NAND Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) make their integration into hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage systems nontrivial. Flash memory suffers from limits on its reliability, is an order of magnitude more expensive than the magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs), and can sometimes be as slow as the HDD (due to excessive garbage collection (GC) induced by high intensity of random writes). Given the complementary properties of HDDs and SSDs in terms of cost, performance, and lifetime, the current consensus among several storage experts is to view SSDs not as a replacement for HDD, but rather as a complementary device within the high-performance storage hierarchy. Thus, we design and evaluate such a hybrid storage system with HybridPlan that is an improved capacity planning technique to administrators with the overall goal of operating within cost-budgets. HybridPlan is able to find the most cost-effective hybrid storage configuration with different types of SSDs and HDDs