Adaptive energy-aware design of a multi-bank flash-memory storage system

An architectural solution to reducing energy consumption of flash-memory storage system is to take advantage of a multi-bank architecture instead of a single-bank one. Thus, allowing unused banks to be placed into low-power operating modes can help reduce energy. In this paper, an adaptive energy-aware bank assignment policy is proposed to cluster data with temporal affinity into the same bank, increasing the number of banks put into low-power modes. Then we propose an energy-aware garbage collection policy, which could keep banks in idle conditions for long durations of time to compensate for resynchronization penalties. Experiments over the prototype show the effectiveness of these policies and indicate that large energy savings can be achieved with low overhead.