FMMU: A Hardware-Accelerated Flash Map Management Unit for Scalable Performance of Flash-Based SSDs.

Address translation is increasingly a performance bottleneck in flash-based SSDs (solid state drives).We propose a hardware-accelerated flash map management unit called FMMU to speed up the address translation. The FMMU operates in a non-blocking manner without any involvement of software and uses in-cache linked list to enhance the performance of flush operations. Simulation study shows that the FMMU improves IOPS (I/O operations per second) by 135 % on average when compared against software-only approaches. The results also show that the performance gap widens as the number of flash chips/buses and the host interface speed increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]