A Novel Non-Volatile Memory Update Mechanism for 6G Edge Computing

In the 6G era, the service demand for extreme performance of artificial intelligence (AI) applications poses a huge performance challenge for edge computing servers. The introduction of non-volatile memory (NVM) can effectively improve the storage performance and unleash the computing power of edge servers. However, most NVM technologies have intrinsic weaknesses such as asymmetric performance in reading and writing. As a result, if the server follows the traditional data-update mechanism, such as copy-on-write (CoW), the write latency may be amplified and thus the performance of AI applications may be impaired. To improve this issue, we propose a novel data-update mechanism on NVM without any consistency losses, called PostMerge. It stores the data increments directly into a new NVM space and then merges them into the target blocks later. A low-overhead metadata-management policy is also introduced for maintaining the read performance. We implement the PostMerge mechanism on PMFS, a well-known NVM file system. The experimental results show that PostMerge adds only a slight software overhead and has an obvious advantage over CoW in write-intensive tasks. When writing large data blocks, PostMerge achieves an improvement 1.7 times greater than that of the write bandwidth of the original CoW.