The ADvanced Systems Laboratory (ADSL)
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Getting Real: Lessons in Transitioning Research Simulations into Hardware Systems
Mohit Saxena,
Yiying Zhang,
Michael M. Swift
Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau,
Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
NetApp, Inc.
Department of Computer Sciences,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract:
Flash-based solid-state drives have revolutionized storage
with their high performance. Their sophisticated internal
mechanisms have led to a plethora of research on
how to optimize applications, file systems, and internal
SSD designs. Due to the closed nature of commercial devices
though, most research on the internals of an SSD,
such as enhanced flash-translation layers, is performed
using simulation or emulation. Without implementation
in real devices, it can be difficult to judge the true benefit
of the proposed designs.
In this paper, we describe our efforts to implement two
new SSD designs that change both the internal workings
of the device and its interface to the host operating system.
Using the OpenSSD Jasmine board, we develop
a prototype of FlashTier’s Solid State Cache (SSC) and
of the Nameless Write SSD. While the flash-translation
layer changes were straightforward, we discovered unexpected
complexities in implementing extensions to the
storage interface.
We describe our implementation process and extract a
set of lessons applicable to other SSD prototypes. With
our prototype we validate the performance claims of
FlashTier and show a 45-52% performance improvement
over caching with an SSD and a 90% reduction in erases.
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