language: en

A SERVER OF DISTRIBUTED DISK PAGES USING A CONFIGURABLE SOFTWARE BUS

Charles Falkenberg, Paul Hagger and Steve Kelley
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and The Department of Computer Science University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

ABSTRACT As network latency drops below disk latency, access time to a remote disk will begin to approach local disk access time. The performance of I/O may then be improved by spreading disk pages across several remote disk servers and accessing disk pages in parallel. To research this we have prototyped a data page server called a Page File. This persistent data type provides a set of methods to access disk pages stored on a cluster of remote machines acting as disk servers. The goal is to improve the throughput of database management system or other I/O intensive application by accessing pages from remote disks and incurring disk latency in parallel. This report describes the conceptual foundation and the methods of access for our prototype.

[With oversight by Office of Naval Research, this research is supported by ARPA/SISTO in conjunction with the Domain Specific Software Architectures project.]