WWCLOCK: Page Replacement Algorithm Considering Asymmetric I/O Cost of Flash Memory

Flash memories have asymmetric I/O costs for read and write in terms of latency and energy consumption. However, the ratio of these costs is dependent on the type of storage. Moreover, it is becoming more common to use two flash memories on a system as an internal memory and an external memory card. For this reason, buffer cache replacement algorithms should consider I/O costs of device as well as possibility of reference. This paper presents WWCLOCK(Write-Weighted CLOCK) algorithm which directly uses I/O costs of devices along with recency and frequency of cache blocks to selecting a victim to evict from the buffer cache. WWCLOCK can be used for wide range of storage devices with different I/O cost and for systems that are using two or more memory devices at the same time. In addition to this, it has low time and space complexity comparable to CLOCK algorithm. Trace-driven simulations show that the proposed algorithm reduces the total I/O time compared with LRU by 36.2% on average.