Pattern-aware write-back strategy to minimize energy consumption of PCM-based storage systems

Phase-change memory (PCM) is a potential candidate to replace flash memory in the storage design of mobile computing systems, but its energy consumption becomes a challenging issue when the multi-level cell (MLC) technology is adopted to reduce its unit cost. In contrast to the existing works that focus on reducing energy consumption at the hardware/device level, we propose an energy-aware memory management design with a pattern-aware write-back strategy in the software/OS level. It selects and writes proper data from main memory to PCM device with minimized energy consumption with considering the data bit pattern, data access locality, and characteristics of PCM. The experiments were conducted based on the workloads collected from representative benchmarks to evaluate the capability of the proposed design, and the results are very encouraging.