Implications of Small Memory and Fast Storage in Emerging Computing Devices

As fast storage media like Optane has emerged recently, the traditional memory and storage architecture consisting of DRAM and hard disk drive needs to be revisited. This paper explores the performance of emerging computing systems that adopt fast storage and analyzes the implications of such systems. If storage becomes very fast, the current memory and storage configurations need to be reassessed. This paper quantifies the performance of systems with fast storage through extensive measurement studies, and finds that decreasing the memory size does not degrade the performances if fast storage is made use of. The effect of I/O modes is also varied as fast storage is adopted. Specifically, the effect of synchronous write and direct I/O in fast storage is less significant than that in hard disks. Based on these observations, this paper discusses an emerging computing device with minimized memory size and fast storage, and compares it with conventional computer systems composed of regular memory size and slow disk storage. We argue that such new memory-storage setting may be used in future computing systems that should accommodate applications with ever growing memory footprints. We expect that our analysis will guide directions for designing a new memory and storage hierarchy of emerging computing devices.