Quantifying Temporal and Spatial Localities Due to File System Caching

Modern storage consists of many optimizations along the data path, from the front-end file system cache and disk layout management to the back-end disk controller cache and on-disk caching. Various components generally exploit the temporal and spatial localities of a workload to improve performance. However, how localities of a workload are transformed by each optimization is not well understood, resulting in designs that are more reflective of the understanding of the front-end workload than that of the locality characteristics immediately before the component. This research studies how file system caching transforms temporal and spatial localities. This understanding helps us quantify how before-cache workloads (e.g., references sent from an application t