BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0 ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR94-226 ENTRY:: January 20, 1995 ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science TITLE:: Disk-directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors TYPE:: Technical Report (paper) REVISION:: 1 AUTHOR:: Kotz, David NOTE:: The 'January' in DATE is an arbitrary placeholder. DATE:: January 1994 RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to Technical Report Librarian Department of Computer Science Dartmouth College 6211 Sudikoff Laboratory Hanover, NH 03755-3510 USA RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-226.ps.Z RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR94-226.pdf ABSTRACT:: Many scientific applications that run on today's multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains are possible. Indeed, disk-directed I/O provided consistent high performance that was largely independent of data distribution, and close to the maximum disk bandwidth. NOTE:: Revised 11/8/94. NOTE:: A shorter version of this paper appeared in OSDI, although this TR has more recent numbers. The OSDI version is available here. A more complete journal version is here. NOTE:: The simulator software is also available.. END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR94-226