Cache-coherent accelerators for persistent memory crash consistency

Ankit Bhardwaj, Todd Thornley, Vinita Pawar, Reto Achermann, Gerd Zellweger, Ryan Stutsman

Abstract: Building persistent memory (PM) data structures is difficult because crashes interrupt operations, leaving data structures in an inconsistent state. Solving this requires augmenting code that modifies PM state to ensure that interrupted operations can be completed or undone. Today, this is done using careful, hand-crafted code, a compiler pass, or page faults. We propose a new, easy way to transform volatile data structure code to work with PM that uses a cache-coherent accelerator to do this augmentation, and we show that it may outperform existing approaches for building PM structures.