Energy conservation techniques for disk array-based servers
Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Supercomputing
Competitive prefetching for concurrent sequential I/O
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2007
RG-EDF: An I/O Scheduling Policy for Flash Equipped Sensor Devices
SEUS '08 Proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 10.2 international workshop on Software Technologies for Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems
What is the future of disk drives, death or rebirth?
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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Low disk throughput is one of the main impediments to improving the performance of data-intensive servers. In this paper, we propose two management techniques for the disk controller cache that can significantly increase disk throughput. The first technique, called File-Oriented Read-ahead (FOR), adjusts the number of read-ahead blocks brought into the disk controller cache according to file system information. The second technique, called Host-guided Device Caching (HDC), gives the host control over part of the disk controller cache. As an example use of this mechanism, we keep the blocks that cause the most misses in the host buffer cache permanently cached in the disk controller. Our detailed simulations of real server workloads show that FOR and HDC can increase disk throughput by up to 34% and 24%, respectively, in comparison to conventional disk controller cache management techniques. When combined, the techniques can increase throughput by up to 47%.