ABSTRACT:
A large spectrum of
data-intensive applications, ranging from small system tools such as CVS and
grep, to terascale simulation applications that process huge amounts of scientific
data, demand efficient I/O support. In almost all computing platforms, the
ubiquitous hard disk remains the most cost-effective medium for on-line
storage. While the growth of hard-disk capacity nicely matches the rapidly increasing
demand for storage, its electromechanical nature is such that performance
improvements lag painfully far behind that of processor performance. We
continue to observe that the disk bottleneck is worsening in modern computer
systems.
In this talk I will present
our research on improving disk I/O performance through a better utilization of
disk buffer cache. I will describe an
integrated caching and prefetching scheme, called DiskSeen, that not only makes
access patterns of applications exploitable bythe buffer cache, but also
makes the data layout of the disk visible and exploitable by the buffer cache.
By making disk layout visible to the buffer cache, Diskseen provides
functionalities that existing systems do not have. Examples includes random
disk accesses being treated differently than sequential accesses so that disk
accessesbecome more sequential, and
prefetching being carried out directly on disk blocks using history access
information so that metadata and inter-file prefetching is enabled. Using Linux
kernel implementations I demonstrate that this technique can significantly
improve the performance of a wide variety of applications.
BIO:
Dr. Song Jiang is an
assistant professor of the ECE department at Wayne State
University. He received
his Ph.D in computer science at the College
of William and Mary in 2004.
After that he had been a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National
Laboratory for two years. His current research is in the amelioration of the
I/O performance bottleneck in various computer system architectures and I/O
performance management in networked storage systems. His research has seen a
continuum of publications in leading conferences such as USENIX and FAST. His
work on process/memory scheduling to prevent process thrashing has been
incorporated into the official version of current Linux kernel.
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