Using Intelligent Prefetching to Reduce the Energy Consumption of a Large-scale Storage System

Many high performance large-scale storage systems will experience significant workload increases as their user base and content availability grow over time. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center hosts one such system that has recently undergone a period of rapid growth as its user population grew nearly 400% in just about three years. When administrators of these massive storage systems face the challenge of meeting the demands of an ever increasing number of requests, the easiest solution is to integrate more advanced hardware to existing systems. However, additional investment in hardware may significantly increase the system cost as well as daily power consumption. In this paper, we present evidence that well-selected software level optimization is capable of achieving comparable levels of performance without the cost and power consumption overhead caused by physically expanding the system. Specifically, we develop intelligent prefetching algorithms that are suitable for the unique workloads and user behaviors of the world\u27s largest satellite images distribution system managed by USGS EROS. Our experimental results, derived from real-world traces with over five million requests sent by users around the globe, show that the EROS hybrid storage system could maintain the same performance with over 30% of energy savings by utilizing our proposed prefetching algorithms, compared to the alternative solution of doubling the size of the current FTP server farm

Web Proxy Cache Replacement Policies Using Decision Tree (DT) Machine Learning Technique for Enhanced Performance of Web Proxy

Web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage (caching) of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag. A web cache stores the copies of documents passing through it and any subsequent requests may be satisfied from the cache if certain conditions are met. In this paper, Decision Tree (DT ) a machine learning technique has been used to increase the performance of traditional Web proxy caching policies such as SIZE, and Hybrid. Decision Tree (DT) is used and integrated with traditional Web proxy caching techniques to form better caching approaches known as DT - SIZE and DT - Hybrid. The proposed approaches are evaluated by trace - driven simulation and compared with traditional Web proxy caching techniques. Experimental results have revealed that the proposed DT - SIZE and DT - Hybrid significantly increased Pure Hit - Ratio, Byte Hit - Ratio and reduced the latency when compared with SIZE and Hybrid

A performance model of speculative prefetching in distributed information systems

Previous studies in speculative prefetching focus on building and evaluating access models for the purpose of access prediction. This paper investigates a complementary area which has been largely ignored, that of performance modelling. We use improvement in access time as the performance metric, for which we derive a formula in terms of resource parameters (time available and time required for prefetching) and speculative parameters (probabilities for next access). The performance maximization problem is expressed as a stretch knapsack problem. We develop an algorithm to maximize the improvement in access time by solving the stretch knapsack problem, using theoretically proven apparatus to reduce the search space. Integration between speculative prefetching and caching is also investigated, albeit under the assumption of equal item sizes