SSDExplorer: A virtual platform for SSD simulations

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming more and more popular, driven by the restless growth of high performance computing and cloud applications. The development of an SSD architecture implies the analysis of a bunch of trade-offs that, if properly understood, can tighten the SSD design space, thus reducing the prototyping effort. Although SSD hardware prototyping platforms are the best way to capture realistic system behaviors, they inherently suffer from a lack of flexibility. To tackle this challenge and to identify the optimum design, under a given set of constraints, the SSD research community is increasingly relying on sophisticated software tools for modeling and simulating SSD platforms. In the first part of this chapter the authors take a careful look at both literature and available simulation tools, including VSSIM, NANDFlashSim, and DiskSim. All these solutions are benchmarked against performances of real SSDs, including an OCZ VERTEX 120 GB and a NVRAM card used in large enterprise storage platform, that have been measured under different traffic workloads. PROs and CONs of each simulator are analyzed, pointing out which kind of answers each of them can give and at what price. The second part of the chapter is devoted to an advanced simulator named “SSDExplorer”, which is a fine-grained SSD virtual platform that was developed with the following goals in mind.