USENIX supports diversity, equity, and inclusion and condemns hate and discrimination.
The Flipside: A Bit Flip Saved Is Power and Lifetime Earned
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
We have an opportunity to rethink, from scratch, the design of our data structures. New byte-addressable non-volatile memory (BNVM) technologies promise the construction of systems with large persistent memories, potentially improving reliability and performance. With these technologies come new characteristics that deviate from those of flash and spinning disk—and with new characteristics come new optimization goals. In particular, the read/write cost disparity and fine granularity of updates allows us to save power and wear by reducing the bits flipped during writes to memory. Targeting these optimizations by formulating new data structure design and implementation strategies instead of relying on existing ideas will be vital for BNVM technology to reach its full potential. We modified a full-system simulator to count bit flips during program operation, opening the door for future research to design, construct, and evaluate data structures for these new goals.
Download Article:
Article Section:
PROGRAMMING
;login: issue: