Efficient Support of Position Independence on Non-Volatile Memory

This paper explores solutions for enabling efficient supports of position independence of pointer-based data structures on byte-addressable None-Volatile Memory (NVM). When a dynamic data structure (e.g., a linked list) gets loaded from persistent storage into main memory in different executions, the locations of the elements contained in the data structure could differ in the address spaces from one run to another. As a result, some special support must be provided to ensure that the pointers contained in the data structures always point to the correct locations, which is called position independence. This paper shows the insufficiency of traditional methods in supporting position independence on NVM. It proposes a concept called implicit self-contained representations of pointers, and develops two such representations named off-holder and Region ID in Value (RIV) to materialize the concept. Experiments show that the enabled representations provide much more efficient and flexible support of position independence for dynamic data structures, alleviating a major issue for effective data reuses on NVM. CCS CONCEPTS • Hardware → Memory and dense storage; • Computer systems organization → Architectures; • Software and its engineering → Compilers; General programming languages;