The Automatic Improvement of Locality in Storage Systems Windsor W. Hsuyz Alan Jay Smithz Honesty C. Youngy yStorage Systems Department Almaden Research Center IBM Research Division San Jose, CA 95120 fwindsor,
[email protected] zComputer Science Division EECS Department University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 fwindsorh,
[email protected] Report No. UCB/CSD-03-1264 July 2003 Computer Science Division (EECS) University of California Berkeley, California 94720 The Automatic Improvement of Locality in Storage Systems Windsor W. Hsuyz Alan Jay Smithz Honesty C. Youngy yStorage Systems Department zComputer Science Division Almaden Research Center EECS Department IBM Research Division University of California San Jose, CA 95120 Berkeley, CA 94720 fwindsor,
[email protected] fwindsorh,
[email protected] Abstract 80 Random I/O (4KB Blocks) ) s Sequential I/O Disk I/O is increasingly the performance bottleneck in r u o 60 H computer systems despite rapidly increasing disk data ( k s transfer rates. In this paper, we propose Automatic i D e r Locality-Improving Storage (ALIS), an introspective i t n 40 E storage system that automatically reorganizes selected d a disk blocks based on the dynamic reference stream to e R o t increase effective storage performance. ALIS is based e 20 m on the observations that sequential data fetch is far more i T efficient than random access, that improving seek dis- tances produces only marginal performance improve- 0 ments, and that the increasingly powerful processors and 1991 1995 1999 2003 large memories in storage systems have ample capacity Year Disk was Introduced to reorganize the data layout and redirect the accesses so as to take advantage of rapid sequential data trans- Figure 1: Time Needed to Read an Entire Disk as a fer.