A software approach for combating asymmetries of non-volatile memories

The recent advances in non-volatile memory technologies promise the delivery of future high performance and low power computing systems. While these technologies provide attractive features, they exhibit different degrees of asymmetric read/write behavior, resulting in under utilization of the technology benefits in many scenarios. Future systems should be aware of this asymmetry to fully utilize these memory technologies. In this paper, we propose software dispatch, a cross-layer approach to distribute data to appropriate memory resources based on an application's data access characteristics. We demonstrate the application of the proposed technique through a case study system with hybrid memory caches, on which we achieve over 5% performance improvement and 9.8% power savings compared to the state-of-the-art technique. © 2012 ACM.