A Study of R-tree Performance in Hybrid Flash/3DXPoint Storage

The flash based solid state drives have become the storage medium of choice for many applications, replacing traditional HDDs in almost any data center. Their advent has motivated many research efforts in data management. 3DXPoint, a new non-volatile memory with even better specifications, is a breakthrough for storage systems; featuring low latency and high IOPS, 3DXPoint can create new lines of research. Towards this direction, hybrid storage systems combining, both flash and 3DXPoint, seem to be an adequate roadmap, since the cost of 3DXPoint remains high. In this paper, we study the performance of R-tree on both flash and 3DXPoint SSDs through careful experimentation. We also examine a simple yet illuminating approach to develop a hybrid index. The conducted experiments on one real and two synthetic datasets show that spatial indexes can achieve significant performance gains by exploiting 3DXPoint technology. To the best of our knowledge this is the first research effort that considers a hybrid flash/3DXPoint storage for R-tree.