FAST: Quick Application Launch on Solid-State Drives

Application launch performance is of great importance to system platform developers and vendors as it greatly affects the degree of users’ satisfaction. The single most effective way to improve application launch performance is to replace a hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD), which has recently become affordable and popular. A natural question is then whether or not to replace the traditional HDD-aware application launchers with a new SSD-aware optimizer. We address this question by analyzing the inefficiency of the HDD-aware application launchers on SSDs and then proposing a new SSD-aware application prefetching scheme, called the Fast Application STarter (FAST). The key idea of FAST is to overlap the computation (CPU) time with the SSD access (I/O) time during an application launch. FAST is composed of a set of user-level components and system debugging tools provided by the Linux OS (operating system). In addition, FAST uses a system-call wrapper to automatical...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: FAST
• Authors: Yongsoo Joo, Junhee Ryu, Sangsoo Park, Kang G. Shin
• Keywords: Aware Application, FAST 2011, Operating System, Platform Developers, Solid State Drive