Title
EXCES: External caching in energy saving storage systems
Abstract
Power consumption within the disk-based storage sub- system forms a substantial portion of the overall energy footprint in commodity systems. Researchers have proposed external caching on a persistent, low-power storage device, which we term external caching device (ECD), to minimize disk activity and conserve energy. While recent simulation- based studies have argued in favor of this approach, the lack of an actual system implementation has precluded an- swering several key questions about external caching sys- tems. We present the design and implementation of EX- CES, an external caching system that employs prefetching, caching, and buffering of disk data for reducing disk ac- tivity. EXCES addresses important questions related to ex- ternal caching, including the estimation of future data pop- ularity, I/O indirection, continuous reconfiguration of the ECD contents, and data consistency. We evaluated EXCES with both micro- and macro- benchmarks that address idle, I/O intensive, and real-world workloads. Overall system energy savings was found to lie in the modest 2-14% range, depending on the workload, in somewhat of a contrast to the higher values predicted by earlier studies. Furthermore, while the CPU and memory overheads of EXCES were well within acceptable limits, we found that flash-based external caching can substantially degrade I/O performance. We be- lieve that external caching systems hold promise. Further improvements in ECD technology, both in terms of their power consumption and performance characteristics can help realize the full potential of such systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658630
HPCA
Keywords
Field
DocType
cache storage,power aware computing,disk data buffering,disk-based storage subsystem,energy saving storage system,external caching device,power consumption,prefetching
Indirection,Central processing unit,Computer science,Parallel computing,Implementation,Real-time computing,False sharing,Control reconfiguration,Benchmark (computing),Data consistency,Overhead (business)
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1530-0897
14
0.79
References 
Authors
15
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luis Useche11205.25
Jorge Guerra21406.50
Medha Bhadkamkar3323.23
Mauricio Alarcon4141.12
Raju Rangaswami575041.17