LibPM: Simplifying Application Usage of Persistent Memory

Persistent Memory devices present properties that are uniquely different from prior technologies for which applications have been built. Unfortunately, the conventional approach to building applications fail to either efficiently utilize these new devices or provide programmers a seamless development experience. We have built LibPM, a Persistent Memory Library that implements an easy-to-use container abstraction for consuming PM. LibPM’s containers are data hosting units that can store arbitrarily complex data types while preserving their integrity and consistency. Consequently, LibPM’s containers provide a generic interface to applications, allowing applications to store and manipulate arbitrarily structured data with strong durability and consistency properties, all without having to navigate all the myriad pitfalls of programming PM directly. By providing a simple and high-performing transactional update mechanism, LibPM allows applications to manipulate persistent data at the speed of memory. The container abstraction and automatic persistent data discovery mechanisms within LibPM also simplify porting legacy applications to PM. From a performance perspective, LibPM closely matches and often exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art application libraries for PM. For instance, LibPM ’s performance is 195× better for write intensive workloads and 2.6× better for read intensive workloads when compared with the state-of-the-art Pmem.IO persistent memory library.