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Research approach: Assuming the RPC latency increase is acceptable, how would we do research for Flash-Cloud? My suggestion is to use DRAM based systems to avoid dependences to the performance characteristics, avaiability, and cost of Flash systems over the next few years. We can write a software layer that emulates the characteristics of Flash on top of DRAM in order to see performance issues. Nevertheless, we will still avoid implementing any complex log protocol for persistenc. As a side project, some HW students can architect the prefect Flash system for us.
We can also avoid the emulation layer altogether by optimistically assuming that PCM will happen by the time we finish the project.