PhD Seminar • DimmStore: Tackling Memory Power Footprint of Database Systems

Alexey Karyakin, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Energy consumed by the main memory in existing database systems does not effectively scale down with lower system utilization, both in terms of actual memory usage and load conditions. At the same time, main memory represents a sizable portion of the total server energy footprint, which makes it an outlier as the rest of the system moves towards energy proportionality. 

We introduce DimmStore, a prototype main-memory database system that addresses the problem of memory energy consumption. The system employs two main mechanisms to take advantage of existing power management features of modern DRAM: rank-aware data allocation and access-rate based data placement of data elements. Based on individual DIMM power measurements, we present experimental results that confirm energy savings in several transactional workloads.