Morning Tutorial 1: Persistent Memory Programming on Conventional Hardware

Often overlooked in the excitement surrounding novel byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) hardware is a purely *software* abstraction of persistent memory that can be implemented on conventional hardware, without NVM. Persistent memory invites the same programming style, with similar advantages: Applications become dramatically simpler because they store persistent data in memory and manipulate it with CPU instructions, eliminating large, complex, opaque external persistent stores such as relational databases and key-value stores. Furthermore, persistent application data exist only in the in-memory format, eliminating the need for translation to/from a different persistent format. Finally, programmers think only in the paradigm of imperative algorithms for in-memory data structures; there's no need to mentally context switch to a different paradigm, e.g., declarative SQL manipulating relational data.

We begin with a thorough review of the one commonality underlying all persistent memory programming platforms and frameworks for C/C++ from both industry and academia: the art of laying out application data in file-backed memory mappings. We master a handful of essential techniques, idioms, and tricks that enable developers to confidently write efficient and correct software in the persistent memory style. We learn the tradeoffs between relocatable vs. fixed-address persistent data structures. We flag the pitfalls surrounding multi-threaded persistent memory programming and learn to circumvent them. We survey crash-tolerance mechanisms for the persistent memory style of programming, including those that require special NVM hardware (NVDIMMs or Optane) and also those that admit implementation on conventional hardware (volatile DRAM and block storage). We show how to write from scratch, in two dozen lines of straightforward C code, an efficient and portable crash-tolerance mechanism that works on both conventional hardware and NVM. We learn from extensive industry experience with successfully retrofitting crash-tolerance onto complex legacy production software that was not originally designed to survive crashes.

The tutorial will consider working C/C++ programs, showing how to evolve non-persistent data structures into persistent data structures, and then showing how to prevent crashes from corrupting them. At each stage in the progression, code deltas illustrate the steps that the developer must take and the factors that she must consider. Example code and explanatory documentation will be provided. Most importantly, students will learn how to write such software themselves.

Students are encouraged but not required to prepare by reading the following article:

"Persistent Memory Programming on Conventional Hardware"
ACM Queue magazine, Vol. 17, No. 4, July/August 2019