Bandana: Using Non-volatile Memory for Storing Deep Learning Models

Typical large-scale recommender systems use deep learning models that are stored on a large amount of DRAM. These models often rely on embeddings, which consume most of the required memory. We present Bandana, a storage system that reduces the DRAM footprint of embeddings, by using Non-volatile Memory (NVM) as the primary storage medium, with a small amount of DRAM as cache.