ReplayCache: Enabling Volatile Cachesfor Energy Harvesting Systems
Jianping Zeng, Jongouk Choi, Xinwei Fu, Ajay Paddayuru Shreepathi, Dongyoon Lee, Changwoo Min, Changhee Jung
Abstract
Energy harvesting systems have shown their unique benefit of ultra-long operation time without maintenance and are expected to be more prevalent in the era of Internet of Things. However, due to the batteryless nature, they suffer unpredictable frequent power outages. They thus require a lightweight mechanism for crash consistency since saving/restoring checkpoints across the outages can limit forward progress by consuming hard-won energy. For the reason, energy harvesting systems have been designed with a non-volatile memory (NVM) only. The use of a volatile data cache has been assumed to be not viable or at least challenging due to the difficulty to ensure cacheline persistence.