USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Oakland, CA, February 2018.
Arash Tavakkol†, Juan Gómez-Luna†, Mohammad Sadrosadati†, Saugata Ghose§, Onur Mutlu†§
§ Carnegie Mellon University
† ETH Zürich
computer systems today, including in datacenters and enterprise servers. As the I/O demands of these systems continue to increase, manufacturers are evolving SSD architectures to keep up with this demand. For example, manufacturers have introduced new high-bandwidth interfaces to replace the conventional SATA host–interface protocol. These new interfaces, such as the NVMe protocol, are designed specifically to enable the high amounts of concurrent I/O bandwidth that SSDs are capable of delivering.
While modern SSDs with sophisticated features such as the NVMe protocol are already on the market, existing SSD simulation tools have fallen behind, as they do not capture these new features. We find that state-of-theart SSD simulators have three shortcomings that prevent them from accurately modeling the performance of real off-the-shelf SSDs. First, these simulators do not model critical features of new protocols (e.g., NVMe), such as their use of multiple application-level queues for requests and the elimination of OS intervention for I/O request processing. Second, these simulators often do not accurately capture the impact of advanced SSD maintenance algorithms (e.g., garbage collection), as they do not properly or quickly emulate steady-state conditions that can significantly change the behavior of these algorithms in real SSDs. Third, these simulators do not capture the full end-to-end latency of I/O requests, which can incorrectly skew the results reported for SSDs that make use of emerging non-volatile memory technologies. By not accurately modeling these three features, existing simulators report results that deviate significantly from real SSD performance.
In this work, we introduce a new simulator, called MQSim, that accurately models the performance of both modern SSDs and conventional SATA-based SSDs. MQSim faithfully models new high-bandwidth protocol implementations, steady-state SSD conditions, and the full end-to-end latency of requests in modern SSDs. We validate MQSim, showing that it reports performance results that are only 6%-18% apart from the measured actual performance of four real state-of-the-art SSDs. We show that by modeling critical features of modern SSDs, MQSim uncovers several real and important issues that were not captured by existing simulators, such as the performance impact of inter-flow interference. We have released MQSim as an open-source tool, and we hope that it can enable researchers to explore directions in new and different areas.
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