Feedback-based Dynamic Proportion Allocation for Disk I/O

In this paper we propose to use feedback control to automatically allocate disk bandwidth in order to match the rate of disk I/O to the real-rate [13] needs of applications. We describe a model for adaptive resource management based on measuring the relative progress of stages in a producer-consumer pipeline. We show how to use prefetching to transform a passive disk into an active data producer whose progress can be controlled via feedback. Our progress-based framework allows the integrated control of multiple resources. The resulting system automatically adapts to varying application rates as well as to varying device latencies. 1 Introduction Real-rate applications [13] have specific disk I/O rate and throughput requirements that are driven by real-world demands. Examples of applications with real-rate disk I/O requirements include multimedia applications, real-time databases, and Internet servers. Real-rate applications suffer from uneven I/O throughput on conventional systems. To..