Towards an Unwritten Contract of Intel Optane SSD

Kan Wu, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
2019 USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems  
New non-volatile memory technologies offer unprecedented performance levels for persistent storage. However, to exploit their full potential, a deeper performance characterization of such devices is required. In this paper, we analyze a NVM-based block device -the Intel Optane SSD -and formalize an "unwritten contract" of the Optane SSD. We show that violating this contract can result in 11x worse read latency and limited throughput (only 20% of peak bandwidth) regardless of parallelism. We
more » ... ent that this contract is relevant to features of 3D XPoint memory and Intel Optane SSD's controller/interconnect design. Finally, we discuss the implications of the contract.
dblp:conf/hotstorage/WuAA19 fatcat:hekn72qegfgkroaa5st4444aoi