Context-Aware Prefetching at the Storage Server

In many of today's applications, access to storage constitutes the major cost of processing a user request. Data prefetching has been used to alleviate the storage access latency. Under current prefetching techniques, the storage system prefetches a batch of blocks upon detecting an access pattern. However, the high level of concurrency in today's applications typically leads to interleaved block accesses, which makes detecting an access pattern a very challenging problem. Towards this, we propose and evaluate QuickMine, a novel, lightweight and minimally intrusive method for contextaware prefetching. Under QuickMine, we capture application contexts, such as a transaction or query, and leverage them for context-aware prediction and improved prefetching effectiveness in the storage cache. We implement a prototype of our context-aware prefetching algorithm in a storage-area network (SAN) built using Network Block Device (NBD). Our prototype shows that context-aware prefetching...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Gokul Soundararajan, Madalin Mihailescu, Cristiana Amza
• Keywords: Access Patterns, Operating System, Storage Access Latency, Today's Applications, USENIX 2008