Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1994

Publication Title

Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Many scientific applications that run on today's multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, \em disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains are possible. Indeed, disk-directed I/O provided consistent high performance that was largely independent of data distribution, and close to the maximum disk bandwidth.

Original Citation

David Kotz. Disk-directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors. In Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments, 1994.

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