NCache: A Machine-Learning Cache Management Scheme for Computational SSDs

Inside a solid-state disk (SSD), cache stores frequently accessed data to shorten the user-I/O response time and reduce the number of read/write operations in flash memory, thereby improving SSD performance and lifetime. Most existing cache schemes anchor in the spatiotemporal locality of I/O requests in workloads. In the face of a long-time workload, high performance and hit rate often get lost in these caching schemes. Flash memory-aware caching schemes trade hit ratio to prolong SSD lifetime. In this article, we advocate for a machine-learning-based caching scheme named NCache to optimize both hit ratio and SSD performance. In NCache, we construct a machine learning (i.e., ML) model to predict whether data are reaccessed before being evicted from the cache. The cache replacement scheme preferentially evicts data that would not be accessed in the cache. The cache space is conserved for valid data that are likely to be repeatedly accessed. A pipelined scheme is implemented to accelerate the ML model, alleviating the time-cost of NCache. A double-linked list boosts the data addressing and cache replacement process. NCache is orthogonal to the existing caching schemes within the flash translation layer. The results validate NCache under a handful of real-world enterprise traces. Taking prn_0 as an example, NCache reduces the response time of LRU, clean first LRU (CFLRU), GCaR_LRU, GCaR_CFLRU, and LCR by up to 15% with an average of 6.4%. The erase count is slashed by 16% at the maximum. Importantly, NCache is adroit at optimizing write amplification by up to 15.9%.