The NVMW Persistent Impact Prize is awarded annually to papers published at least five years prior that have had an exceptional impact on the fields of study related to non-volatile memories. The award committee interprets both “impact” and “non-volatile memories” broadly. To be eligible, work must have appeared in a major, peer-reviewed, archival conference or journal (i.e., appeared in official proceedings or journal publication). For conference papers, the date of the conference will be used to determine eligibility. For journals, we will use the publication date. There is no requirement for the work to have been presented at the NVMW. The award includes a cash prize.

Anyone may nominate any paper (including self-nominations). The nominator should send a one-page nominating statement to htseng@ucr.edu by February 17, 2024 that includes the following:

  1. The name of the nominated paper.
  2. A citation of the nominated paper (i.e., a bibliography entry).
  3. A summary of the paper’s contributions and its impact since publication.  If the paper has had impact beyond conventional metrics (e.g., citation count), be sure to highlight it.
  4. A suggested “citation statement” (e.g., “This paper laid the foundation of widget design theory and paved the way for…”) for the award.
  5. The nominating statement should not include the nominator’s name.

2022 Winners

Systems

Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM Alternative

Benjamin C. Lee, Engin Ipek, Onur Mutlu and Doug Burger

2009 International Symposium on Computer Architecture

Award Citation

“Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM Alternative” is awarded the 2022 Persistent impact prize in recognition of its seminal contribution to understanding how non-volatile memories might replace conventional DRAM.  It also played a critical role in introducing PCM technology to the architecture community, spawning wide range of follow-on work.

ECC

Portable and Error-Free DNA-Based Data Storage

S. M. Hossein T. Yazdi, Ryan Gabrys and Olgica Milenkovic

Nature Scientific Reports 2017

Award Citation

“Portable and Error-Free DNA-Based Data Storage” is awarded the 2022 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contribution to the field of DNA-based storage systems and developing a portable, random-access platform using nanopore sequencers, which is a crucial step towards practical employment of DNA molecules as storage media.

2021 Winners

Systems

Enhancing Lifetime and Security of Phase Change Memories via Start-Gap Wear Leveling

Moinuddin K. Qureshi, John Karidis, Michele Franceschini, Viji Srinivasan, Luis Lastras and Bulent Abali

2009 International Symposium on Microarchitecture

Award Citation

“Enhancing Lifetime and Security of Phase Change Memories via Start-Gap Wear Leveling” is awarded the 2021 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contribution to wear-leveling techniques for persistent memories.  Start-Gap is an elegant, efficient, and easily-implemented solution to the wear-leveling problem and has become the de-facto standard wear-leveling technique in low-latency non-volatile memory research.

ECC

New Array Codes for Multiple Phased Burst Correction

Mario Blaum, Ron M. Roth

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 1993

Award Citation

“New array codes for multiple phased burst correction” is awarded the 2021 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contribution to the foundation for array codes, which are now widely studied and applied to RAID-like storage systems.

2020 Winners

Systems

Better I/O through Byte-addressable, Persistent Memory

Jeremy Condit, Edmund B.Nightingale, Christopher Frost, Engin Ipek, Benjamin Lee, Doug Burger and Derrick Coetzee

SOSP 2009

Award Citation

“Better I/O Through Byte-Addressable, Persistent Memory”  is awarded the 2020 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contribution to key NVMM design principles, including exposing NVM directly to the CPU and relying on hardware primitives for ordering updates to NVM, and the development of a file system that follows these principles to provide fast atomic updates to NVM, thereby breaking long-standing tensions between performance, durability, and consistency.

ECC

Rank Modulation for Flash Memories

Anxiao Jiang, Robert Mateescu, Moshe Schwartz and Jehoshua Bruck

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2009

Award Citation

“Rank Modulation for Flash Memories” is awarded the 2020 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of the seminal contributions to the theory of information representation in non-volatile memories and of an innovative and effective approach to dealing with the problem of charge leakage in flash memories.

2019 Winner

Scalable High-Performance Main Memory System Using Phase-Change Memory Technology

Moinuddin K. Qureshi, Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan, and Jude A. Rivers

ISCA 2009

Award Citation

“Scalable high-performance main memory system using phase-change memory technology” is awarded the 2019 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contribution to hybrid memory systems that combine phase change memory and DRAM.  It was one of the very first papers to propose such a system and describe how careful design can overcome the limitations of both technologies to build scalable, fast, reliable memory systems.  It is especially exciting to see how the paper anticipated and influenced the structure of many subsequent proposals for hybrid memory systems.

2018 Winner

Mnemosyne: Lightweight Persistent Memory

Haris Volos and Mike Swift

ASPLOS 2011

Award Citation

Mnemosyne is awarded the 2018 Persistent Impact Prize in recognition of its contributions to the foundations of programming with non-volatile main memory.   It was among the first to identify the need to address persistent memory as part of the programming model; propose lightweight transactions to support persistence; and handle consistency under failure.  The problems it described and the solutions it proposed have influenced the design of most (if not all) of persistent main memory systems that followed it.

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