Publication
MEMSYS 2019
Conference paper

Evaluation of intel 3D-Xpoint NVDIMM technology for memory-intensive genomic workloads

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Abstract

New 3D-XPointTM technology, developed by Intel and Micron, promises to deliver high-density, lower-cost, non-volatile storage with DRAM-like performance characteristics. This paper presents a detailed empirical evaluation of Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory solution that provides 3D-XPoint NV-DIMMs, which are directly attached to the memory bus. We evaluate general performance through a set of micro-benchmarks and also evaluate application-specific performance through measurement of a production bioinformatics workload (genome K-mer analysis). This is a memory-intensive workload that does not scale-out well with conventional data-partitioning and therefore directly benefits from increased main memory capacity. Thus, for this workload, 3D-Xpoint is key to enabling previously unattainable results. We compare performance with existing DRAM memory, evaluate different modes of operation and examine multiple integration approaches.

Date

30 Sep 2019

Publication

MEMSYS 2019