Challenges and Opportunities as Persistence Moves Up the Memory/Storage Hierarchy

While the storage industry is wrestling to incorporate persistent memory in its system and software designs, even bigger challenges lurk around the corner. Systems include a lot of other memory besides DIMMs. The near future will bring persistent caches, and even persistent registers! As CPUs move to smaller semiconductor processes, MRAM and other emerging memory types will replace on-chip SRAM to completely change the nature of cache memory. From here, it will be a small step to make persistent internal CPU registers. With all of these changes, software can not only be designed to perform better as a result of the persistence, but will need to be designed in a way that prevents persistence from undermining security and reliability. This presentation, by the authors of an annual research report on emerging memories, will show how and why memory at all levels will become persistent and will reflect on problems that must be solved both to use it effectively, and to prevent persistence from causing trouble.

Learning Objectives

Show that persistence isn’t going to stop at main memory, but will move into the processor cache and eventually into registers.,Find what problems are likely to crop up (security and the like) and what will need to be considered in solving these issues,Learn of some of the benefits persistence can bring when it rises higher in the memory/storage hierarchy, including power savings and faster access to persistent storage for higher performance