A self-tuning disk striping system for parallel input/output. dissertation

In this thesis, we propose a self-tuning approach for automatically select-ing and refining the file system’s striping parameters based on application access patterns. The technique presented here relies on the monitoring of application I/O requests and the application of an analytic model to deter-mine file striping parameters that improve overall file system performance. The application I/O requests are characterized by their size, type, duration and inter-arrival times, and clustered into representative groups to deter-mine typical request sizes. Then, an analytical striping model is used to determine potential performance improvements. Input parameters to this model include the disk and network system characteristics, and knowledge of application I/O access pattern behavior. The output of the model is the estimated response time as a function of the request size, request rate and stripe depth. An optimum stripe depth that minimizes the average response time can be calculated from this output