Paper Info
Title
HintStor: A Framework to Study I/O Hints in Heterogeneous Storage
Abstract
AbstractTo bridge the giant semantic gap between applications and modern storage systems, passing a piece of tiny and useful information, called I/O access hints, from upper layers to the storage layer may greatly improve application performance and ease data management in storage systems. This is especially true for heterogeneous storage systems that consist of multiple types of storage devices. Since ingesting external access hints will likely involve laborious modifications of legacy I/O stacks, it is very hard to evaluate the effect and take advantages of access hints. In this article, we design a generic and flexible framework, called HintStor, to quickly play with a set of I/O access hints and evaluate their impacts on heterogeneous storage systems. HintStor provides a new application/user-level interface, a file system plugin, and performs data management with a generic block storage data manager. We demonstrate the flexibility of HintStor by evaluating four types of access hints: file system data classification, stream ID, cloud prefetch, and I/O task scheduling on a Linux platform. The results show that HintStor can execute and evaluate various I/O access hints under different scenarios with minor modifications to the kernel and applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3489143
ACM Transactions on Storage
Keywords
DocType
Volume
I/O access hints, heterogeneous storage systems, block storage, data management
Journal
18
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1553-3077
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiongzi Ge100.34
Zhichao Cao217223.04
David Hung-Chang Du363474.40
Pradeep Ganesan400.34
Dennis Hahn500.34