Dynamic Data Migration in Hybrid Main Memories for In-Memory Big Data Storage

For memory-based big data storage, using hybrid memories consisting of both dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and non-volatile random-access memories (NVRAMs) is a promising approach. DRAM supports low access time but consumes much energy, whereas NVRAMs have high access time but do not need energy to retain data. In this paper, we propose a new data migration method that can dynamically move data pages into the most appropriate memories to exploit their strengths and alleviate their weaknesses. We predict the access frequency values of the data pages and then measure comprehensively the gains and costs of each placement choice based on these predicted values. Next, we compute the potential benefits of all choices for each candidate page to make page migration decisions. Extensive experiments show that our method improves over the existing ones the access response time by as much as a factor of four, with similar rates of energy consumption.