R&D: Request Flow Coordination for Growing-Scale SSD

IEEE Transactions on Computers has published an article written by Ming-Chang Yang, Computer Science and Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 26451 New Territories, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Yuan-Hao Chang, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Tei-Wei Kuo, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan 106, and Chun-Feng Wu, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, 38017 Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract: “Performance-intensive applications have led both interface and architecture changes of high-end, growing-scale solid-state drives (SSDs). However, we observe that most of the time, the actual drive performance could not be easily scaled or boosted up with the increasing of internal resources of growing-scale SSDs due to the potential congestion of I/O requests. Such observation inspires this work to look for a request flow coordination design to appropriately control and throttle the I/O request over the increasingly-complicated SSD internal organization with manageable coordination overhead. The main objective is to avoid overloading or congesting any sub-module of growing-scale SSDs by making good use of the abundant internal resources, so as to effectively improve the drive performance in terms of the request response time. The capability of the proposed design was evaluated with realistic and intensive I/O workloads, and the results are very encouraging.“