Crash consistency overhead is a long-standing barrier to the adoption of byte-addressable persistent memory in practice. Despite continuous progress, persistent transactions for crash consistency still incur a 5.6X slowdown, making persistent memory prohibitively costly in practical settings. This paper introduces speculative logging, a new method that forgoes most memory fences and reduces data persistence overhead by logging data values early. This technique enables a novel persistent transaction model, speculatively persistent memory transactions (SpecPMT). Our evaluation shows that SpecPMT reduces the execution time overheads of persistent transactions substantially to just 10%.

Log creation, maintenance, and its persist ordering are known to be performance bottlenecks for durable transactions on persistent memory. Existing hardware persistent memory transactions overlook an important opportunity for improving performance: some persistent data is algorithmically redundant such that it can be recovered from other data, removing the need for logging such data. The paper presents an ISA extension that enables selective logging for hardware persistent memory transactions for the first time. The ISA extension features two novel components: fine-grain logging and lazy persistency. Fine-grain logging allows hardware to log updates on data in the granularity of words without lengthening the critical path of data accesses. Lazy persistency allows updated data to remain in the cache after the transaction commits. Together, the new hardware persistent memory transaction outperforms the state-of-the-art hardware counterpart by 1.8× on average.

The advent of byte-addressable persistent memory opens an important opportunity for document databases to read and write durable data fetching them into DRAM. Reaping the benefit of persistent memory is not straightforward, as existing document databases are tailored for disk storage. They assume that the disk and DRAM data movement dominates the performance. However, this paper points out that data indexing becomes the performance bottleneck when porting document databases to persistent memory. The paper proposes PMLiteDB, the first persistent memory document database with streamlined access paths. PMLiteDB introduces two techniques,direct readingandselective caching.Direct readingstreamlines the translation from document IDs to the address of documents whenever possible by swizzling the IDs intopersistent memory references. It guarantees to use only up-to-datepersistent memory referenceswhen document movements invalidate associated references.Selective cachingreduces data movements between DRAM and persistent memory by selectively caching only frequently accessed persistent memory data pages with a DRAM buffer. For other pages, the database loads data on them directly without caching. Compared to the design that adopts persistent memory as a fast disk without exploiting the byte-addressability, PMLiteDB achieves 2.33× on average and up to 6.18× speedup.

Pedestrian attribute recognition is to predict the presence of a set of attributes from a given image, and it plays an important role in video surveillance applications. Most existing works model the task as a multi-label classification problem. Although effective, they ignore the existence of correlations among attributes. In this work, to learn multiple attributes jointly, the attributes are modeled as a subspace and a dictionary is introduced to represent the subspace. Furthermore, to extract the convolutional features which are more suitable for attribute prediction, the dictionary is modeled as a network layer which is learned jointly with the convolutional network. Finally, a novel learning algorithm is proposed to optimize the dictionary and the convolutional network corporately. Extensive experimental analyses and evaluations on two largest pedestrian attribute benchmarks PETA and PA-100K demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.