• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.428-433
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• 2017

Recently, the demand for high performance non-volatile memory storage devices that can replace existing hard disks has been increasing in environments requiring high performance computing such as data-centers and social network services. The performance of such non-volatile memory can greatly depend on the interface between the host and the storage device. With the evolution of storage interfaces, the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface has emerged, which can replace serial attached SCSI and serial ATA (SAS/SATA) interfaces based on existing hard disks. The NVMe interface has a higher level of scalability and provides lower latency than traditional interfaces. In this paper, an evaluation and analysis are conducted of the performance of NVMe storage devices through various workloads. We also compare and evaluate the cost efficiency of NVMe SSD and SATA SSD.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.129-137
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• 2018

NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSD(Solid State Drive) is a high-performance storage that makes use of flash memory as a storage cell, PCIe as an interface and NVMe as a protocol on the interface. It supports multiple I/O queues which makes it feasible to process parallel-I/Os on multi-core environments and to provide higher bandwidth than SATA SSDs. Hence, NVMe SSD is considered as a next generation-storage for data-center and cloud computing system. However, in the virtualization system, the performance of NVMe SSD is not fully utilized due to the bottleneck of the software I/O stack. Especially, when it uses I/O stack of the hypervisor or the host operating system like Xen and KVM, I/O performance degrades seriously due to doubled-I/O stack between host and virtual machine. In this paper, we propose a new I/O engine, called Direct-AIO (Direct-Asynchronous I/O) engine, that can access NVMe SSD directly for I/O performance improvements on QEMU emulator. We develop our proposed I/O engine and analyze I/O performance differences between the existed I/O engine and Direct-AIO engine.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.139-147
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• 2017

In recent years, non-volatile memory express (NVMe), a new host controller interface standard, has been adapted to overcome performance bottlenecks caused by the acceleration of solid state drives (SSD). Recently, performance breakthrough cases over AHCI based SATA SSDs by adapting NVMe based PCI Express (PCIe) SSD to servers and PCs have been reported. Furthermore, replacing legacy eMMC-flash storage with NVMe based storage is also considered for next generation of mobile devices such as smartphones. The Linux kernel includes drivers for NVMe support, and as the kernel version increases, the implementation of the NVMe driver code has changed. However, mobile devices are often equipped with older versions of Android operating systems (OSes), where the newest features of NVMe drivers are not available. Therefore, different features of different NVMe driver implementations are not well evaluated on Android OSes. In this paper, we analyze the response time of the NVMe driver for various Linux kernel version.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.12
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• pp.1480-1485
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• 2015

As SSDs are increasingly being used as high-performance storage or caches, attention is increasingly paid to the provision of SSDs with Quality-of-Service for I/O request streams of various applications in server systems. Since most SSDs are using the AHCI controller interface on a SATA bus, it is not possible to provide a differentiated service by distinguishing each I/O stream from others within the SSD. However, since a new SSD interface, the NVME controller interface on a PCI Express bus, has been proposed, it is now possible to recognize each I/O stream and schedule I/O requests within the SSD for differentiated services. This paper proposes Flash Operation Group Scheduling within NVME-based flash storage devices, and demonstrates through QEMU-based simulation that we can achieve a proportional bandwidth share for each I/O stream.