Revisiting hash table design for phase change memory

Abstract

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is emerging as an attractive alternative to Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) in building data-intensive computing systems. PCM offers read/write performance asymmetry that makes it necessary to revisit the design of in-memory applications. In this paper, we focus on in-memory hash tables, a family of data structures with wide applicability. We evaluate several popular hash-table designs to understand their performance under PCM. We find that for write-heavy workloads the designs that achieve best performance for PCMdiffer from the ones that are best for DRAM, and that designs achieving a high load factor also cause a high number of memory writes. Finally, we propose PFHT, a PCM-Friendly Hash Table which presents a cuckoo hashing variant that is tailored to PCM characteristics, and offers a better trade-off between performance, the amount of writes generated, and the expected load factor than any of the existing DRAM-based implementations.