• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.836-840
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• 2009

Many researchers have studied flash memory in order to replace hard disk storages. Many FTL algorithms have been proposed to overcome physical constraints of flash memory such as erase-before-write, wear leveling, and poor write performance. Therefore, these constraints should be considered for testing FTL algorithms and the performance evaluation of flash memory. As doing the experiments, we suffer from several problems with costs and settings in experimental configuration. When we, for example, replay the traces of Oracle to evaluate the I/O performance with flash memory, it is hard to extract exact traces of I/O operations in Oracle. Since there are only write operations in the log, it is impossible to gather read operations. In MySQL and SQLite, we can gather the read operations by changing I/O functions in the source codes. But it is not easy to search for the exact points about I/O and even if we can find out the points, we might get wrong results depending on how we modify source codes to get I/O traces. The FlaSim proposed in this paper removes the difficulties when we evaluate the performance of FTL algorithms and flash memory. Our Linux drivers emulate the flash memory as a hard disk. And we can easily obtain the usage statistics of flash memory such as the number of write, read, and erase operations. The FlaSim can be gracefully extended to support the additional modules implemented by novel algorithms and ideas. In this paper, we describe the structure of FTL emulator, development tools and operating methods. We expect this emulator to be helpful for many experiments and research with flash memory.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2007.06b
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• pp.377-380
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• 2007

플래시 메모리는 무게, 내구성, 전력 소비량 측면에서 기존 디스크보다 우수하기 때문에 주로 휴대용 기기의 저장장치로 사용되었다. 최근에는 집적도가 향상되면서 SSD(Solid State Disk)형태로 노트북에서도 활용되고 있다. 이러한 플래시 메모리는 제자리 갱신이 불가능한 특징 때문에 저장장치로 사용하기 위해서는 FTL(Flash Memory Translation Layer)이라는 주소사상 소프트웨어가 필요하다. 그리고 FTL은 블록을 재활용하기 위해 병합 연산을 수행하게 되는데 이 병합 연산의 비용이 시스템 성능에 큰 영향을 미친다. 아울러 FTL 상에서 동작하는 파일 시스템의 경우도 디스크 기반 파일 시스템과 같이 단편화 문제로 인한 성능 저하가 발생하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 플래시 메모리 기반 파일 시스템에서 단편화 현상을 줄이기 위해 FTL의 병합동작의 특성을 활용한 조각 모음 기법을 제안한다. 실험결과는 제안한 기법이 결국 FTL에서 병합 연산의 비용을 줄임으로써 성능을 향상시킬 수 있음을 보여준다.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.535-543
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• 2015

Recently, NAND flash based storage devices are being used as a storage device in various fields through hiding the limitations of NAND flash memory and maximizing the advantages. In particular, those storage devices contain a software layer called Flash Translation Layer(FTL) to hide the "erase-before-write" characteristics of NAND flash memory. FTL includes the metadata for managing the data requested from host. That metadata is stored in internal memory because metadata is very frequently accessed data for processing the requests from host. Thus, if the power-loss occurs, all data in memory is lost. So metadata management scheme is necessary to store the metadata periodically and to load the metadata in the initialization step. Therefore we proposed the scheme which satisfies the core requirements for metadata management and efficient operation. And we verified the efficiency of proposed scheme by experiments.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.1-12
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• 2015

NAND flash memory has being used for storage systems widely, because it has good features which are low-price, low-power and fast access speed. However, NAND flash memory has an in-place update problem, and therefore it needs FTL(flash translation layer) to run for applications based on hard disk storage. The FTL includes complex functions, such as address mapping, garbage collection, wear leveling and so on. Futhermore, implementation of the FTL on low-power embedded systems is difficult due to its memory requirements and operation overhead. Accordingly, many index data structures for NAND flash memory have being studied for the embedded systems. Overall performances of the index data structures are enhanced by a decreasing of page write counts, whereas it has increased page read counts, as a side effect. Therefore, we propose an index management method using a page mapping log table in $B^+$-Tree based on NAND flash memory to decrease page write counts and not to increase page read counts. The page mapping log table registers page address information of changed index node and then it is exploited when retrieving records. In our experiment, the proposed method reduces the page read counts about 61% at maximum and the page write counts about 31% at maximum, compared to the related studies of index data structures.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.23-30
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• 2010

Flash memory is non-volatile and can retain data even after system is powered off. Besides, it has many other features such as fast access speed, low power consumption, attractive shock resistance, small size, and light-weight. As its price decreases and capacity increases, the flash memory is expected to be widely used in consumer electronics, embedded systems, and mobile devices. Flash storage systems generally adopt a software layer, called FTL. In this research, we proposed a new FTL mechanism for overcoming the major drawback of conventional block mapping algorithm. In addition to the block mapping table, a index block mapping table with a small size is used to indicate sector location. The proposed indexed block mapping algorithm by adding a small size. By the simulation result, the proposed FTL provides an enhanced speed than a conventional hybrid mapping algorithm by around 45% in average, and the requirement of mapping memory is also reduced by around 12%.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

Recently, NAND flash memory, which is used as a storage medium, is replacing HDD (Hard Disk Drive) at a high speed due to various advantages such as fast access speed, low power, and easy portability. In order to apply NAND flash memory to a computer system, a Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is indispensably required. FTL provides a number of features such as address mapping, garbage collection, wear leveling, and hot data identification. In particular, hot data identification is an algorithm that identifies specific pages where data updates frequently occur. Hot data identification helps to improve overall performance by identifying and managing hot data separately. MHF (Multi hash framework) technique, known as hot data identification technique, records the number of write operations in memory. The recorded value is evaluated and judged as hot data. However, the method of counting the number of times in a write request is not enough to judge a page as a hot data page. In this paper, we propose hot data identification which considers not only the number of write requests but also the persistence of write requests.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2015

NAND flash systems require deletion operation and do not support in-place update, so the storage systems should use Flash Translation Layer (FTL). However, there are a lot of memory consumptions using mapping table in the FTL, so recently, many studies have been proposed to resolve mapping table overhead. These studies try to solve update propagation problem in the nand flash system which does not use mapping table. In this paper, we present a novel index structure, called CL-Tree(Cache List Tree), to solve the update propagation problem. The proposed index structure reduces write operations which occur for an update propagation, and it has a good performance for search operation because it uses multi-list structure. In experimental evaluation, we show that our scheme yields about 173% and 179% improvement in insertion speed and search speed, respectively, compared to traditional B+tree and other works.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-16
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• 2020

Recently, the capacity of SSD has been increasing rapidly due to the improvement of flash memory density. To take full advantage of these SSDs, first of all, FTL's prompt adaptation is necessary. The FTL is a translation layer existing in SSDs to overcome the drawback of the SSD that cannot be modified in place, and has garbage collection and caching functions in addition to the map table management function. In this study, we focus on caching function, compare and analyze the cache implementation methodologies, and propose improved methods. Typical cache implementations divide the cache into groups, manage and retrieve the caches in the group as a linked list. Thus, searches are made in the order of the linked list. In contrast, we propose a method of sequential searching using the search area group of a cache registered in the map table regardless of the linked list and cache group. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a 2.5 times improvement over the conventional method.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.18D no.3
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• pp.157-168
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• 2011

Recently flash memory has been being utilized as a main storage device in mobile devices, and flashSSDs are getting popularity as a major storage device in laptop and desktop computers, and even in enterprise-level server machines. Unlike HDDs, on flash memory, the overwrite operation is not able to be performed unless it is preceded by the erase operation to the same block. To address this, FTL(Flash memory Translation Layer) is employed on flash memory. Even though the modified data block is overwritten to the same logical address, FTL writes the updated data block to the different physical address from the previous one, mapping the logical address to the new physical address. This enables flash memory to avoid the high block-erase cost. A flashSSD has an array of NAND flash memory packages so it can access one or more flash memory packages in parallel at once. To take advantage of the internal parallelism of flashSSDs, it is beneficial for DBMSs to request I/O operations on sequential logical addresses. However, the B-tree structure, which is a representative index scheme of current relational DBMSs, produces excessive I/O operations in random order when its node structures are updated. Therefore, the original b-tree is not favorable to SSD. In this paper, we propose AS(Always Sequential) B-tree that writes the updated node contiguously to the previously written node in the logical address for every update operation. In the experiments, AS B-tree enhanced 21% of B-tree's insertion performance.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.25-32
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• 2017

Recently, the use of NAND flash memory is being increased as a secondary device to displace conventional magnetic disk. NAND flash memory, as one among non-volatile memories, has many advantages such as low power, high reliability, low access latency, and so on. However, NAND flash memory has disadvantages such as erase-before-write, unbalanced operation speed, and limited P/E cycles, unlike conventional magnetic disk. To solve these problems, NAND flash memory mainly adopted FTL (Flash Translation Layer). In particular, garbage collection technique in FTL tried to improve the system lifetime. However, previous garbage collection techniques have a sensitive property of the system lifetime according to write pattern. To solve this problem, we propose BSGC (Balanced Selection-based Garbage Collection) technique. BSGC efficiently selects a victim block using all intervals from the past information to the current information. In this work, SFL (Search First linked List), as the proposed block allocation policy, prolongs the system lifetime additionally. In our experiments, SFL and BSGC prolonged the system lifetime about 12.85% on average and reduced page migrations about 22.12% on average. Moreover, SFL and BSGC reduced the average response time of 16.88% on average.