A Survey on PCMBased Big Data Storage and Management

Big data has become a hot topic in both academia and industry. However, due to the limitations of current computer system architectures, big data management is facing a lot of new challenges w.r.t. performance, energy, etc. Recently, a new kind of storage media called phase change memory (PCM) introduces new opportunities for advancing computer architectures and big data management, due to its nonvolatility, byteaddressability, high read speed, low energy, etc. As a kind of nonvolatile storage media, PCM has some unique features of DRAM, such as byteaddressability and high readwrite performance, thus can be regarded as a crosslayer storage media for redesigning current storage architecture so as to realize highperformance storage. In this paper, we summarize the features of PCM, and present a survey on PCMbased data management. We discuss the related advances in terms of two aspects, namely that PCM is used as secondary storage and that PCM is used as main memory. We also introduce the current studies on the applications of PCM in various areas. Finally, we propose some future research directions on PCMbased data management so as to provide some valuable references for big data storage and management on new storage architectures.