LAC: A Workload Intensity-Aware Caching Scheme for High-Performance SSDs

Inside an NAND Flash-based solid-state disk (SSD), utilizing DRAM-based write-back caching is a practical approach to bolstering the SSD performance. Existing caching schemes overlook the problem of high user I/Os intensity due to the dramatic increment of I/Os accesses. The hefty I/O intensity causes access conflict of I/O requests inside an SSD: a large number of requests are blocked to impair response time. Conventional passive update caching schemes merely replace pages upon access misses in event of full cache. Tail latency occurs facing a colossal I/O intensity. Active write-back caching schemes utilize idle time among requests coupled with free internal bandwidth to flush dirty data into flash memory in advance, lowering response time. Frequent active write-back operations, however, cause access conflict of requests – a culprit that expands write amplification (WA) and degrades SSD lifetime. We address the above issues by proposing a workL oad intensity-aware and A ctive parallel Caching scheme - LAC - that is powered by collaborative-load awareness. LAC fends off user I/Os’ access conflict under high-I/O-intensity workloads. If the I/O intensity is low – intervals between consecutive I/O requests are large – and the target die is free, LAC actively and concurrently writes dirty data of adjacent addresses back to the die, cultivating clean data generated by the active write-back. Replacing clean data in priority can reduce response time and prevent flash transactions from being blocked. We devise a data protection method to write back cold data based on various criteria in the cache replacement and active write-backs. Thus, LAC reduces WA incurred by actively writing back hot data and extends SSD lifetime. We compare LAC against the six caching schemes (LRU, CFLRU, GCaR-LRU, MQSim, VS-Batch, and Co-Active) in the modern MQSim simulator. The results unveil that LAC trims response time and erase count by up to 78.5% and 47.8%, with an average of 64.4% and 16.6%, respectively.