Ziggurat - A Tiered File System for Non-Volatile Main Memories and Disks

Explore a 30-minute conference talk from FAST '19 that introduces Ziggurat, a tiered file system designed for Non-Volatile Main Memories (NVMM) and disks. Discover how this innovative system combines NVMM and slow disks to achieve near-NVMM performance with large storage capacity. Learn about Ziggurat's intelligent write steering mechanism, which directs incoming writes to NVMM, DRAM, or disk based on application access patterns, write size, and potential application stalls. Understand the system's online profiling technique for predicting individual write behaviors and its background process for estimating data temperature and migrating cold file data. Examine how Ziggurat optimizes disk bandwidth utilization through data block coalescing. Delve into the experimental results showcasing Ziggurat's significant throughput improvements compared to EXT4 and XFS on SSDs. Follow the presentation's structure, covering topics such as data placement policy, synchronicity predictor, write size predictor, cold data identification, file operations, and evaluation using Filebench and RocksDB.