Making Early Predictions of File Accesses

Abstract—Nearly all extant file access predictors attempt to identify the immediate successor to the file being currently accessed. As a result, they leave almost no time to prefetch the predicted file before it is accessed. We present here a Perceptron-based file predictor that identifies the files that will be accessed up to five accesses ahead. Experimental evidence shows that our early predictor can make between 30 and 78 percent of correct predictions, depending on the nature of the file system workload and the position of the access it attempts to predict. I