A working-set sensitive page replacement policy for PCM-based swap systems

Abstract

Due to the recent advances in Phage-Change Memory (PCM) technologies, a new memory hierarchy of computer systems with PCM is expected to appear. In this paper, we present a new page replacement policy that adopts PCM as a high speed swap device. As PCM has limited write endurance, our goal is to minimize the amount of data written to PCM. To do so, we defer the eviction of dirty pages in proportion to their dirtiness. However, excessive preservation of dirty pages in memory may deteriorate the page fault rate, especially when the memory capacity is not enough to accommodate full working-set pages. Thus, our policy monitors the current working-set size of the system, and controls the deferring level of dirty pages not to degrade the system performances. Simulation experiments show that the proposed policy reduces the write traffic to PCM by 160% without performance degradations. © 2017, Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea. All rights reserved.