An Empirical Guide to the Behavior and Use of Scalable Persistent Memory

Researchers have been anticipating the arrival of commercially available, scalable non-volatile main memory technologies that provide “byte-addressable” storage that survives power outages. With the arrival of Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory Module, we can start to understand the real capabilities and characteristics of these memories and start designing systems to fully leverage them. We experimented with an Intel system complete with Optane and have learned how to get the most performance out of this new technology. Our testing has helped us understand the hidden complexities of Intel’s new devices.