• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.67-72
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• 2010

Recently increasing application of flash memory in mobile and ubiquitous related devices is due to its non-volatility, fast response time, shock resistance and low power consumption. Following this trend, SSD(Solid State Disk) using multiple flash chips, instead of hard-drive based storage system, started to widely used for its advantageous features. However, flash memory based storage subsystem should resolve the performance bottleneck for writing in perspective of speed and lifetime according to its disadvantageous physical property. In order to provide tangible performance, solutions are studied in aspect of reclaiming of invalid regions by decreasing the number of erasures and distributing the erasures uniformly over the whole memory space as much as possible. In this paper, we study flash memory recycling algorithms with multiple management units and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides feasible performance. The proposed method utilizes the partitions of the memory space by utilizing threshold values and reconfigures the management units if necessary. The performance of the proposed policies is evaluated through a number of simulation based experiments.

• 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.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.142-150
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• 2021

Open-channel SSD is a new type of Solid-State Disk (SSD) that improves the garbage collection overhead and write amplification due to physical constraints of NAND flash memory by exposing the internal structure of the SSD to the host. However, the host-level Flash Translation Layer (FTL) provided for open-channel SSDs in the current Linux kernel consumes host memory excessively because it use page-level mapping table to translate logical address to physical address. Therefore, in this paper, we implemente a selective mapping table loading scheme that loads only a currently required part of the mapping table to the mapping table cache from SSD instead of entire mapping table. In addition, to increase the hit ratio of the mapping table cache, filesystem information and mapping table access history are utilized for cache replacement policy. The proposed scheme is implemented in the host-level FTL of the Linux kernel and evaluated using open-channel SSD emulator. According to the evaluation results, we can achieve 80% of I/O performance using the only 32% of memory usage compared to the previous host-level FTL.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.308-314
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• 2010

As the price of flash memory continues to drop and the technology of flash SSD controller innovates, high performance flash SSDs with affordable prices flourish in the storage market. Nevertheless, it is hard to expect that flash SSDs will replace harddisks completely as database storage. Instead, the approach to use flash SSD as a cache for harddisks would be more practical, and, in fact, several hybrid storage architectures for flash memory and harddisk have been suggested in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new approach to use flash SSD as an extended buffer for main buffer in database systems, which stores the pages replaced out from main buffer and returns the pages which are re-referenced in the upper buffer layer, improving the system performance drastically. In contrast to the existing approaches to use flash SSD as a cache in the lower storage layer, our approach, which uses flash SSD as an extended buffer in the upper host, can provide fast random read speed for the warm pages which are being replaced out from the limited main buffer. In fact, for all the pages which are missing from the main buffer in a real TPC-C trace, the hit ratio in the extended buffer could be more than 60%, and this supports our conjecture that our simple extended buffer approach could be very effective as a cache. In terms of performance/price, our extended buffer architecture outperforms two other alternative approaches with the same cost, 1) large main buffer and 2) more harddisks.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.12
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• pp.72-82
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• 2014

Recently, the size of semiconductor industry market is constantly growing, due to the increase in diffusion of smart-phone, tablet PC and SSD(Solid State Drive). Also, it is expected that the demand for TLC NAND-type flash memory would gradually increase, with the recent release of TLC NAND-type flash memory in the SSD market. There have been a lot of studies on SLC NAND flash memory, but no research on TLC NAND flash memory has been conducted, yet. Also, a test of NAND-type flash memory is depending on a high-priced external equipment. Therefore, this study aims to suggest a structure for an autonomous test with no high-priced external test device by modifying the existing SLC NAND flash memory and MLC NAND flash memory test algorithms and patterns and applying them to TLC NAND flash memory.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.685-689
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• 2009

Flash memory has several features such as low~power consumption and fast access so that there has been various research on using flash memory as new storage. Especially the Solid State Disk which is composed of flash memory chips has recently replaced the hard disk. At present, SSD adopts the multi-channel and multi-way architecture to exploit advantages of parallel access. In this architecture, data are written on SSD in a unit of a superblock which is composed of multiple blocks in which some blocks are put together. This paper proposes two schemes of selecting, segmenting and re-composing victim superblocks to optimize concurrent processing when a buffer flush occurs. The experimental results show that 35% of superblock- based write operations is reduced by selecting victims and additional 9% by composition of superblock.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.19A no.1
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• pp.35-44
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• 2012

Traditional technologies that are used to improve the performance of hard disk drives show many negative cases if they are applied to solid state drives (SSD). Access time and block sequence in hard disk drives that consist of mechanical components are very important performance factors. Meanwhile, SSD provides superior random read performance that is not affected by block address sequence due to the characteristics of flash memory. Practically, it is recommended to disable prefetching if a SSD is installed in a personal computer. However, this paper presents a combinational method of a prefetching scheme and a memory management that consider the internal structure of SSD and the characteristics of NAND flash memory. It is important that SSD must concurrently operate multiple flash memory chips. The I/O unit size of NAND flash memory tends to increase and it exceeded the block size of operating systems. Hence, the proposed prefetching scheme performs in an operating unit of SSD. To complement a weak point of the prefetching scheme, the proposed memory management scheme adaptively evicts uselessly prefetched data to maximize the sum of cache hit rate and prefetch hit rate. We implemented the proposed schemes as a Linux kernel module and evaluated them using a commercial SSD. The schemes improved the I/O performance up to 26% in a given experiment.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.1031-1040
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• 2010

Hash join is one of the core algorithms in databases management systems. If a hash join cannot complete in one-pass because the available memory is insufficient (i.e., hash table overflow), however, it may incur a few sequential writes and excessive random reads. With harddisk as the tempoary storage for hash joins, the I/O time would be dominated by slow random reads in its probing phase. Meanwhile, flash memory based SSDs (flash SSDs) are becoming popular, and we will witness in the foreseeable future that flash SSDs replace harddisks in enterprise databases. In contrast to harddisk, flash SSD without any mechanical component has fast latency in random reads, and thus it can boost hash join performance. In this paper, we investigate several important and practical issues when flash SSD is used as tempoary storage for hash join. First, we reveal the va patterns of hash join in detail and explain why flash SSD can outperform harddisk by more than an order of magnitude. Second, we present and analyze the impact of cluster size (i.e., va unit in hash join) on performance. Finally, we emperically demonstrate that, while a commerical query optimizer is error-prone in predicting the execution time with harddisk as temporary storage, it can precisely estimate the execution time with flash SSD. In summary, we show that, when used as temporary storage for hash join, flash SSD will provide more reliable cost estimation as well as fast performance.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.240-242
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• 2009

Flash memories are one of best media to support future computer's storages. However, we need to improve traditional data management scheme due to the relatively slow characteristics of flash operation of SSD. Due to the unique characteristics of flash media and hard disk, the efficiency of I/O processing is severely reduced without special treatment, especially in the presence of heavy workload or bulk data copy. In this respect, we need to design and develop efficient hybrid-RAID storage system.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.17-21
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• 2008

Application of flash memory in mobile and ubiquitous related devices is rapidly being increased due to its low price and high performance. In addition, some notebook computers currently come out into market with a SSD(Solid State Disk) instead of hard-drive based storage system. Regarding this trend, applications need to increase the storage capacity using multiple flash memory chips for larger capacity sooner or later. Flash memory based storage subsystem should resolve the performance bottleneck for writing in perspective of speed and lifetime according to its physical property. In order to make flash memory storage work with tangible performance, reclaiming of invalid regions needs to be controlled in a particular manner to decrease the number of erasures and to distribute the erasures uniformly over the whole memory space as much as possible. In this paper, we study the performance of flash memory recycling algorithms and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows acceptable performance for flash memory storage with multiple chips. The proposed cleaning method partitions the memory space into candidate memory regions, to be reclaimed as free, by utilizing threshold values. The proposed algorithm handles the storage system in multi-layered style. The impact of the proposed policies is evaluated through a number of experiments.