PASS: A Proactive and Adaptive SSD buffer Scheme for data-intensive workloads

Owing to their relatively high random-I/O performance and energy-efficiency, SSDs have been widely deployed in data-intensive computing environments as caching and/or terminal storage devices. The buffer-cache of an SSD plays an essential role in bridging the speed gap between the flash components and the host interface. While the existing SSD buffer management schemes are designed to improve SSD performance, they are often rendered ineffective by the widespread bursts of I/O traffic in data-intensive workloads. To address this problem, this paper proposes a Proactive and Adaptive SSD buffer Scheme (PASS) to judiciously and actively flush dirty buffered data in anticipation of traffic bursts by exploiting the light-traffic intervals, as well as the chip-level and channel-level parallelism inside SSD. The results of our extensive trace-driven simulation show that PASS significantly and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art buffer management schemes in both response time and endurance measures.