LAUSR

Energy harvesting systems powered by renewable energy sources employ hybrid volatile-nonvolatile memory to enhance energy efficiency and forward progress. These systems have unreliable power sources and energy buffers with limited capacity, so they complete long-running applications across multiple power outages. However, a power outage might cause data inconsistency, because the data in nonvolatile memories are persistent, while the data in volatile memories are unsteady. State of the art studies proposed various memory architectures and compiler-based techniques to tackle the data inconsistency in these systems. These approaches impose too many unnecessary check-points on the system to avoid data inconsistency. These studies did not consider the effect of cache memory to mask and postpone the imposed check-points on the system for the sake of consistency. In this article, we utilize the cache memory and propose PROWL, a consistency aware cache replacement policy to avoid data inconsistency with fewer check-points. The results show that PROWL has by up to 85 percent fewer check-points compare to the state of the art approaches, and PROWL improves the average response time of the system by up to 65 percent.