Nonvolatile memory is a broken time machine

Ransford, Benjamin; Lucia, Brandon

doi:10.1145/2618128.2618136

Cited by 74 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Some of the more recent systems requiring hardware support to checkpoint include [3,4,7,33,48], Table 1 summarizes the data that get copied to and from the non-volatile memory in service of memory consistency and progress preservation. Checkpointing volatile state alone does not ensure data consistency when the system can directly manipulate non-volatile memory [56]. Precisely, data can get inconsistent when code includes a write-after-read (WAR) dependency between operations that manipulate non-volatile memory.…”

Section: Intermittent Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2019

ACM Trans. Sen. Netw.

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Energy-neutral Internet of Things requires freeing embedded devices from batteries and powering them from ambient energy. Ambient energy is, however, unpredictable and can only power a device intermittently. Therefore, the paradigm of intermittent execution is to save the program state into non-volatile memory frequently to preserve the execution progress. In task-based intermittent programming, the state is saved at task transition. Tasks are fixed at compile time and agnostic to energy conditions. Thus, the state may be saved either more often than necessary or not often enough for the program to progress and terminate. To address these challenges, we propose Coala, an adaptive and efficient task-based execution model. Coala progresses on a multi-task scale when energy permits and preserves the computation progress on a sub-task scale if necessary. Coala's specialized memory virtualization mechanism ensures that power failures do not leave the program state in non-volatile memory inconsistent. Our evaluation on a real energy-harvesting platform not only shows that Coala reduces runtime by up to 54% as compared to a state-of-the-art system, but also it is able to progress where static systems fail. CCS Concepts: • Hardware → Power and energy; • Software and its engineering → Embedded software; Virtual memory;

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Section: Intermittent Executionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2019

ACM Trans. Sen. Netw.

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“…Because power failures are frequent, they can occur while a (non-volatile) data structure is being modified. When the platform reboots, the program will restart with inconsistent data, causing the socalled broken time machine problem [9]. A possible solution would be to have the processor itself non-volatile [10].…”

Section: B Nvram For Transiently-powered Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peripheral state persistence for transiently-powered systems

Berthou

Delizy²,

Marquet³

et al. 2017

2017 Global Internet of Things Summit (GIoTS)

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Recently has emerged the concept of transientlypowered systems: tiny battery-less embedded systems which harvest energy from their environment. To retain information despite frequent and unpredictable power failures, a transientlypowered system can use non-volatile memory to store checkpoints of program state. However current checkpointing techniques only consider the state of computation (processor, memory) and disregard peripheral state completely. This paper presents a software framework that allows for the use of non-trivial peripherals such as analog-to-digital converters, serial interfaces or radio devices, in transiently-powered systems.

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“…[45] have explored the possibility of concurrent programming under intermittent energy and the various efforts required to maintain program consistency. These issues are addressed by means of atomic instructions allied with an on-chip capacitance to ensure that the processor has sufficient power to complete the ongoing instruction.…”

Section: B Architectural Aspects Of Energy Harvestingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture exploration for ambient energy harvesting nonvolatile processors

Yang

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE 21st International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)

198

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Energy harvesting has been widely investigated as a promising method of providing power for ultra-low-power applications. Such energy sources include solar energy, radiofrequency (RF) radiation, piezoelectricity, thermal gradients, etc. However, the power supplied by these sources is highly unreliable and dependent upon ambient environment factors. Hence, it is necessary to develop specialized systems that are tolerant to this power variation, and also capable of making forward progress on the computation tasks. The simulation platform in this paper is calibrated using measured results from a fabricated nonvolatile processor and used to explore the design space for a nonvolatile processor with different architectures, different input power sources, and policies for maximizing forward progress.

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Nonvolatile memory is a broken time machine

Cited by 74 publications

References 12 publications

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Peripheral state persistence for transiently-powered systems

Architecture exploration for ambient energy harvesting nonvolatile processors

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