Atlas: Leveraging Locks for Non-volatile Memory Consistency

Chakrabarti, Dhruva R. ; Boehm, Hans-J. ; Bhandari, Kumud

HP Development Company

关键词: non-volatile memory;    transactions;    locks;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2013-78R1

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

Non-volatile memory, such as memristors and PCRAM, can revolutionize the way programs persist data. In-memory objects can be persistent as the program executes, thus removing the need for a separate data storage format. However, the challenge is to ensure that such data remains consistent if a failure occurs during execution. In this paper, we present Atlas, a system with durability semantics to lock-based code, typically allowing us to automatically maintain a globally consistent state even in the presence of failures. We identify failure-atomic sections of code based on existing critical sections and describe a log-based implementation that can be used to recover a consistent state after a failure. We discuss several subtle semantic issues and implementation tradeoffs. We confirm the ability to rapidly flush caches as a core implementation bottleneck and suggest partial solutions. Experimental results confirm the practicality of our approach and provide insight into the overheads of such a system.