MBS-LVM: A High-Performance Logical Volume Manager for Memory Bus-Connected Storages over NUMA Servers

With the recent advances of memory technologies, high-performance non-volatile memories such as non-volatile dual in-line memory module (NVDIMM) have begun to be used as an addition or an alternative to server-side storages. When these memory bus-connected storages (MBSs) are installed over non-uniform memory access (NUMA) servers, the distance between NUMA nodes and MBSs is one of the crucial factors that influence file processing performance, because the access latency of a NUMA system varies depending on its distance from the NUMA nodes. This paper presents the design and implementation of a high-performance logical volume manager for MBSs, called MBS-LVM, when multiple MBSs are scattered over a NUMA server. The MBS-LVM consolidates the address space of each MBS into a single global address space and dynamically utilizes storage spaces such that each thread can access an MBS with the lowest latency possible. We implemented the MBS-LVM in the Linux kernel and evaluated its performance by porting it over the tmpfs, a memory-based file system widely used in Linux. The results of the benchmarking show that the write performance of the tmpfs using MBS-LVM has been improved by up to twenty times against the original tmpfs over a NUMA server with four nodes.