New techniques to model energy-aware I/O architectures based on SSD and hard disk drives

• Autores: Laura Prada Camacho
• Directores de la Tesis: José Daniel García Sánchez (dir. tes.), Jesús Carretero Pérez (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2012
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Félix García Carballeira (presid.), Javier Fernández Muñoz (secret.), Antonio Pérez Ambite (voc.), Antonio Plaza Miguel (voc.), Rosa Filgueira Vicente (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias tecnológicas
    • Tecnología de los ordenadores
      • Arquitectura de ordenadores
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
• Resumen

  • For years, performance improvements at the computer I/O subsystem and at other subsystems have advanced at their own pace, being less the improvements at the I/O subsystem, and making the overall system speed dependant of the I/O subsystem speed. One of the main factors for this imbalance is the inherent nature of disk drives, which has allowed big advances in disk densities, but not so many in disk performance. Thus, to improve I/O subsystem performance, disk drives have become a goal of study for many researchers, having to use, in some cases, different kind of models. Other research studies aim to improve I/O subsystem performance by tuning more abstract I/O levels. Since disk drives lay behind those levels, real disk drives or just models need to be used. One of the most common techniques to evaluate the performance of a computer I/O subsystem is found on detailed simulation models including specific features of storage devices like disk geometry, zone splitting, caching, read-ahead buffers and request reordering. However, as soon as a new technological innovation is added, those models need to be reworked to include new characteristics, making difficult to have general models up to date. Our alternative is modeling a storage device as a black-box probabilistic model, where the storage device itself, its interface and the interconnection mechanisms are modeled as a single stochastic process, defining the service time as a random variable with an unknown distribution. This approach allows generating disk service times needing less computational power by means of a variate generator included in a simulator. This approach allows to reach a greater scalability in I/O subsystems performance evaluations by means of simulation. Lately, energy saving for computing systems has become an important need. In mobile computers, the battery life is limited to a certain amount of time, and not wasting energy at certain parts would extend the usage of the computer. Here, again the computer I/O subsystem has pointed out as field of study, because disk drives, which are a main part of it, are one of the most power consuming elements due to their mechanical nature. In server or enterprise computers, where the number of disks increase considerably, power saving may reduce cooling requirements for heat dissipation and thus, great monetary costs. This dissertation also considers the question of saving energy in the disk drive, by making advantage of diverse devices in hybrid storage systems, composed of Solid State Disks (SSDs) and Disk drives. SSDs and Disk drives offer different power characteristics, being SSDs much less power consuming than disk drives. In this thesis, several techniques that use SSDs as supporting devices for Disk drives, are proposed. Various options for managing SSDs and Disk devices in such hybrid systems are examinated, and it is shown that the proposed methods save energy and monetary costs in diverse scenarios. A simulator composed of Disks and SSD devices was implemented. This thesis studies the design and evaluation of the proposed approaches with the help of realistic workloads. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------