Optimizing Flash-Based Storage Systems

This dissertation proposes mathematical algorithms for improving Flash-based storage system's four key performance metrics: lifetime, reliability, latency and throughput. The first part of the dissertation presents the novel concept of dynamically voltage allocation (DVA) for Flash memory. Flash memory suffers reduced reliability as the number of program/erase (P/E) cycles increases, thus has a limited lifetime. DVA scales the write threshold voltages of Flash memory adaptively, using lower voltages at the beginning of the lifetime, and gradually increases the scaling to combat the effect of accumulated wear-out from P/E cycling. The proposed algorithm significantly increases the lifetime of the device.The second part of the dissertation introduces the novel design of error correction using incremental redundancy without feedback. Modern storage systems often require high throughput, high reliability and low latency. Traditional variable-length (VL) codes with feedback have demonstrated to provide high throughput and reliability. The new design reinterprets the results for VL codes with feedback using ergodicity, by encoding the incremental redundancy of multiple VL codewords to a common pool of redundancy. The removal of feedback allows storage systems to benefit from the performance of a feedback scheme with a feedforward design. The decoder of the new design exploits the low complexity of short-blocklength decoders and the parallelization structure to reduce latency. The proposed error correction scheme approaches the throughput of corresponding VL codes with feedback.Relying on information theory and coding theory, the proposed algorithms provide new approaches to optimize the Flash-based storage systems