Trading memory for performance and energy

Abstract

Managing extremely large amounts of data with high performance and low power consumption is very difficult. We look at this urgent problem from an architectural perspective and present our prototype design and implementation of a three-layer database storage system, which uses flash-based devices as an intermediate caching layer. The flash-based layer significantly improves the I/O efficiency of the storage system. Therefore, we can reduce the use of energy-inefficient RAM-based memory without compromising the overall system performance. The efficiency of the three-layer storage system is demonstrated by our practical experiments using traces from both standard benchmarks and a real-life application.