VSSIM: Virtual Machine based SSD Simulator

Abstract

In this paper, we present a virtual machine based SSD Simulator, VSSIM (Virtual SSD Simulator). VSSIM intends to address the issues of the trace driven simulation, e.g. trace re-scaling, accurate replay, etc. VSSIM operates on top of QEMU/KVM with software based SSD module. VSSIM runs in realtime and allows the user to measure both the host performance and the SSD behavior under various design choices. VSSIM can flexibly model the various hardware components, e.g. the number of channels, the number of ways, block size, page size, planes per chip, program, erase, read latency of NAND cells, channel switch delay, and way switch delay. VSSIM can also facilitate the implementation of the SSD firmware algorithms. To demonstrate the capability of VSSIM, we performed a number of case studies. The results of the simulation study deliver an important guideline in the firmware and hardware designs of future NAND based storage devices. Followings are some of the findings: (i) as the page size increases, the performance benefit of increasing the channel parallelism against increasing the way parallelism becomes less significant, (ii) due to the bi-modality in IO size distribution, FTL should be designed to handle multiple mapping granularity, (iii) hybrid mapping does not work in four or more way SSD due to severe log block fragmentation, (iv) as a performance metric, the Write Amplification Factor can be misleading, (v) compared to sequential write, random write operation can be benefited more from the channel level parallelism and therefore in multi-channel environment, it is beneficial to categorize larger fraction of IO as random. VSSIM is validated against commodity SSD, Intel X25M SSD. VSSIM models the sequential IO performance of X25M within 3% offset.