An NVM Carol

Around 2010, we observed significant research activity around the development of non-volatile memory technologies. Shortly thereafter, other research communities began considering the implications of non-volatile memory on system design, from storage systems to data management solutions to entire systems. Finally, in July 2015, Intel and Micron Technology announced 3D XPoint. It’s now 2018; Intel is shipping its technology in SSD packages, but we’ve not yet seen the widespread availability of byte-addressable non-volatile memory that resides on the memory bus. We can view non-volatile memory technology and its impact on systems through an historical lens revealing it as the convergence of several past research trends starting with the concept of single-level store, encompassing the 1980s excitement around bubble memory, building upon persistent object systems, and leveraging recent work in transactional memory. We present this historical context, recalling past ideas that seem particularly relevant and potentially applicable and highlighting aspects that are novel.