Professor Myoungsoo Jung and his team from the Department of Electrical Engineering have introduced hardware and software systems that utilize non-volatile memory. This particular type of memory is much more resistant to power failures than their more common and volatile counterparts like DRAM, as non-volatile alternatives can retain their information even without a continuous stream of power. Until now, non-volatile sources of memory have rarely been used as the main memory of a computer system due to their comparatively lower writing speed. Instead, they have been extensively used in secondary memory to store information even when the power of a system is off. Professor Jung’s research team have overcome these limits, also showing promising results in both data storage and command executions in their technology, which they now call Lightweight Persistence Centric System, or LightPC. 

Previously, when non-volatile memory was used for the main memory, performances tended to lag severely behind volatile memory alternatives. Professor Jung’s team tackled these problems by introducing memory controllers and a processor which allows non-volatile memory to perform as well as, if not better than, traditional volatile main memories. This was done by releasing more internal memory in the non-volatile memory through to the host, achieving faster executions. The team was thus able to avoid the common problem encountered when using non-volatile main memory, where both volatile and non-volatile memories are used in tandem to checkpoint information from the volatile to non-volatile sources prior to any power failures.

They have showed that despite switching the power of the system off and back on mid-execution, execution was still successful and 4.3 times faster than when more traditional methods of memory were used. Other improvements include a memory capacity almost eight times greater with power consumptions around a quarter of what would be expected from volatile memory usage. These results are promising towards a future with larger memory sizes and performance in comparison to the power-draw of the non-volatile memory.