PFC: Transparent Optimization of Existing Prefetching Strategies for Multi-Level Storage Systems

The multi-level storage architecture has been widely adopted in servers and data centers. However, while prefetching has been shown as a crucial technique to exploit the sequentiality in accesses common for such systems and hide the increasing relative cost of disk I/O, existing multi-level storage studies have focused mostly on cache replacement strategies. In this paper, we show that prefetching algorithms designed for single-level systems may have their limitations magnified when applied to multi-level systems. Overly conservative prefetching will not be able to effectively use the lower-level cache space, while overly aggressive prefetching will be compounded across levels and generate large amounts of wasted prefetch. We take an innovative approach to this problem: rather than designing a new, multi-level prefetching algorithm, we developed PreFetching-Coordinator (PFC), a hierarchy-aware optimization applicable to any existing prefetching algorithms. PFC does not require any ap...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Zhe Zhang, Kyuhyung Lee, Xiaosong Ma, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Access Patterns, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2008, Lower-level Cache, Multi-level Storage