SPA-SSD: Exploit Heterogeneity and Parallelism of 3D SLC-TLC Hybrid SSD to Improve Write Performance

To address the write performance problem suffered by MLC/TLC flash, researchers have proposed hybrid SSD that aims to combine the strengths of SLC flash, used as the write-buffer zone for its superior write performance, and MLC/TLC flash, as the capacity zone for its high storage density. While leveraging SLC as a physical write-buffer zone is proven effective in traditional 2D hybrid SSDs, how to effectively incorporate SLC into a 3D-stacked TLC to form a hybrid SSD has not been studied to the best of our knowledge. Yet this is a timely and important performance issue for 3D-stacked TLC given its one-shot programming scheme that results in much worse write performance than the programming scheme in 2D TLC where pages are associated with different bits of a cell and programmed in sequence separately. We believe that naively adopting the two-physical-zone approach to 3D hybrid SSD will miss a great opportunity for performance optimization because it ignores the inherent four-level parallelism (channel/chip/die/plane) of the flash chip array. To this end, we propose in this paper an SLC and Parallelism Aware hybrid SSD (SPA-SSD) to take full advantages of SLC's superior write performance, the internal multi-level parallelism of SSD, and the high storage density of 3D-stacked TLC flash. Two novel techniques enable SPA-SSD to be highly effective: (1) Type-Parallelism Joint Page Allocation (TPJ-PA), which allocates pages for write transactions according to not only available SLC pages but also parallelism to maximize resource utilization within the hybrid SSD, and (2) Queue-length and Parallelism Constrained Data Migration (QPC-DM), which triggers data migration without degrading user write performance by analyzing the device queue length and available flash resources. To evaluate performance of SPA-SSD, a hybrid SSD simulator, called HybridSim, is developed based on MQSim. Experimental results on HybridSim show that TPJ-PA improves write throughput by 60%, while QPC-DM improves write throughput by up to 10 times. Besides, trace-driven experiments on HybridSSD demonstrate that SPA-SSD improves the write latency to the flash by up to two orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art designs.