Date: August 14, 1997

Speaker: Liddy Shriver, Bell Labs

Storage device modeling using a composite device model

Abstract:
Our approach to modeling storage devices is to model the individual physical components of the device, such as queues, caches, and disk mechanisms, and then compose the component models. Each component model determines its behavior from the specification of the entering workload and the lower-level device behavior. To support the lower-level component model in determining its behavior, each component model creates a modified workload specification to support the manner that the physical component would modify the entering workload. Modifying the workload specification allows us, for example, to capture the altered spatial locality that occurs when queues reorder their requests.

Our model predicts the device behavior in terms of response time within a relative error ranging from 2% to 30% for interesting subsets of the domain of devices and workloads. To demonstrate this, the model has been validated with synthetic traces of parallel scientific file system workloads and video-on-demand applications and traces of transaction processing applications.

Our contributions to the area of performance modeling for storage devices include the following.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/