Application Specific File Prefetching
Motivation:
Au automatic application-specific file prefetching mechanism on top of standard NFS protocol
Faculty:
Tzi-cker Chiueh
Graduate Students:
Description:
We have developed an automatic application-specific file prefetching
mechanism, that is designed to improve the performance of I/O-intensive
programs with complicated access patterns. The main idea of our approach
is to convert an application into two threads: a
computation thread
,
which is the original program containing both computation and disk I/O,
and a prefetch thread , which contains all the instructions in the
original program that are related to disk I/O. At run time, the prefetch
thread runs far ahead of the computation thread, so that blocks can be
prefetched and put in the file system buffer cache before the computation
thread needs them. A source-to-source translator is developed to automatically
generate the prefetch and computation thread from a given application program,
without any user intervention. A prototype implementation of the proposed
file prefetching mechanism has been successfully implemented,
which provides
as much as 54% performance improvement for real-world applications.
Publications:
- A Decoupled Architecture for Application-Specific File Prefetching , Chuan-Kai Yang, Tulika Mitra, Tzi-cker Chiueh, Freenix Track of USENIX 2002 Annal Conference, Monterey, CA, June 2002.
- I/O-Conscious Volume Rendering ,
Chuan-Kai Yang, Tzi-cker Chiueh, in VisSym '01, Joint Eurographics -
IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization, Ascona, Switzerland, May, 2001.
- Application-Specific File Prefetching for Multimedia Programs ,
Tulika Mitra, Chuan-Kai Yang and Tzi-cker Chiueh,
in IEEE Multimedia '00, New York City, July 2000.
Related links:
Sponsor:
National Science Foundation, CISE/ACIR Award 0083497