uFLIP: Understanding flash IO patterns

Luc Bouganim (1, 2) , Björn Thór Jónsson (3) , Philippe Bonnet (4)

1 PRISM - Parallélisme, Réseaux, Systèmes, Modélisation
2 SMIS - Secured and Mobile Information Systems
3 School of Computer Science [Reykjavik]
4 ITU - IT University of Copenhagen

Does the advent of flash devices constitute a radical change for secondary storage? How should database systems adapt to this new form of secondary storage? Before we can answer these questions, we need to fully understand the performance characteristics of flash devices. More specifically, we want to establish what kind of IOs should be favored (or avoided) when designing algorithms and architectures for flash-based systems. In this paper, we focus on flash IO patterns, that capture relevant distribution of IOs in time and space, and our goal is to quantify their performance. We define uFLIP, a benchmark for measuring the response time of flash IO patterns. We also present a benchmarking methodology which takes into account the particular characteristics of flash devices. Finally, we present the results obtained by measuring eleven flash devices, and derive a set of design hints that should drive the development of flash-based systems on current devices.

Domaines: Base de données [cs.DB]

Luc Bouganim, Björn Thór Jónsson, Philippe Bonnet. uFLIP: Understanding flash IO patterns. 4th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2009, Asilomar, United States. pp.1-12. ⟨hal-00624058⟩