Near-optimal parallel prefetching and caching

• Published in: SIAM journal on computing Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 1051 - 1082
• Main Authors: KIMBREL, T, KARLIN, A. R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia, PA Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 2000
• Subjects: Algorithmics. Computability. Computer arithmetics; Algorithms; Applied sciences; Computer science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems performance. Reliability; Data processing. List processing. Character string processing; Evictions; Exact sciences and technology; Linear programming; Memory organisation. Data processing; Software; Theoretical computing; Input output; Parallelism; Magnetic disk; Algorithm; Operating system; File management
• ISSN: 0097-5397; 1095-7111
• DOI: 10.1137/S0097539797326976

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in the operating systems research community in prefetching and caching data from parallel disks, as a technique for enabling serial applications to improve input--output (I/O) performance. In this paper, algorithms are considered for integrated prefetching and caching in a model with a fixed-size cache and any number of backing storage devices (disks). The integration of caching and prefetching with a single disk was previously considered by Cao, Felten, Karlin, and Li. Here, it is shown that the natural extension of their aggressive algorithm to the parallel disk case is suboptimal by a factor near the number of disks in the worst case. The main result is a new algorithm, reverse aggressive, with near-optimal performance for integrated prefetching and caching in the presence of multiple disks.