ATOM: Atomic Durability in Non-volatile Memory through Hardware Logging

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is emerging as a fast byte-addressable alternative for storing persistent data. Ensuring atomic durability in NVM requires logging. Existing techniques have proposed software logging either by using streaming stores for an undo log; or, by relying on the combination of clflush and mfence for a redo log. These techniques are suboptimal because they waste precious execution cycles to implement logging, which is fundamentally a data movement operation. We propose ATOM, a hardware log manager based on undo logging that performs the logging operation out of the critical path. We present the design principles behind ATOM and two techniques to optimize its performance. Our results show that ATOM achieves an improvement of 27% to 33% for micro-benchmarks and 60% for TPC-C over a baseline undo log design.