Disk Cache Architecture

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With the increases in microprocessor performance and memory capacity that have occurred during the past five years, one of the major difference between high performance supercomputers and the "killer micros" is I/O performance. The primary objective of this investigation is to increase the performance of the I/O subsystem by increasing disk cache performance. The first task considered is to characterize the load presented to a disk controller by analyzing I/O performance. The traces will be collected by instrumenting the device driver for the disk controller. Trace entries will be timestamped so a dynamic view of the system load can be obtained. The second task in the investigation is to use trace-driven simulation to investigate the performance of various disk cache architectures. A major goal of this task is to find ways of exploiting the position dependent nature of disk access latency. Thus, the project will focus on using cache policies that utilize knowledge of the disk's state.