Extending Memory Capacity in Modern Consumer Systems With Emerging Non-Volatile Memory: Experimental Analysis and Characterization Using the Intel Optane SSD

DRAM scalability is becoming a limiting factor to the available memory capacity in consumer devices. As a potential solution, manufacturers have introduced emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) into the market, which can be used to increase the memory capacity of consumer devices by augmenting or replacing DRAM. In this work, we provide the first analysis of the impact of extending the main memory space of consumer devices using off-the-shelf NVMs. We equip real web-based Chromebook computers with the Intel Optane solid-state drive (SSD), which contains state-of-the-art low-latency NVM, and use the NVM as swap space. We analyze the performance and energy consumption of the Optane-equipped Chromebooks, and compare this with (i) a baseline system with double the amount of DRAM than the system with the NVM-based swap space; and (ii) a system where the Intel Optane SSD is naively replaced with a state-of-the-art NAND-flash-based SSD. Our experimental analysis reveals that while Optane-based swap space provides a cost-effective way to alleviate the DRAM capacity bottleneck in consumer devices, naive integration of the Optane SSD leads to several system-level overheads, mostly related to (1) the Linux block I/O layer, which can negatively impact overall performance; and (2) the off-chip traffic to the swap space, which can negatively impact energy consumption. To reduce the Linux block I/O layer overheads, we tailor several system-level mechanisms (i.e., the I/O scheduler and the I/O request completion mechanism) to the currently-running application’s access pattern. To reduce the off-chip traffic overhead, we leverage an operating system feature (called Zswap) that allocates some DRAM space to be used as a compressed in-DRAM cache for data swapped between DRAM and the Intel Optane SSD, significantly reducing energy consumption caused by the off-chip traffic to the swap space. We conclude that emerging NVMs are a cost-effective solution to alleviate the DRAM capacity bottleneck in consumer devices, which can be further enhanced by tailoring system-level mechanisms to better leverage the characteristics of our workloads and the NVM.