Evaluation of intel 3D-Xpoint NVDIMM technology for memory-intensive genomic workloads

New 3D-XPointTM technology, developed by Intel and Micron, promises to deliver high-density, lower-cost, non-volatile storage with DRAM-like performance characteristics. This paper presents a detailed empirical evaluation of Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory solution that provides 3D-XPoint NV-DIMMs, which are directly attached to the memory bus. We evaluate general performance through a set of micro-benchmarks and also evaluate application-specific performance through measurement of a production bioinformatics workload (genome K-mer analysis). This is a memory-intensive workload that does not scale-out well with conventional data-partitioning and therefore directly benefits from increased main memory capacity. Thus, for this workload, 3D-Xpoint is key to enabling previously unattainable results. We compare performance with existing DRAM memory, evaluate different modes of operation and examine multiple integration approaches.