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

Investigating the PageRank and sequence prediction based approaches for next page prediction

Discovering unseen patterns from web clickstream is an upcoming research area. One of the meaningful approaches for making predictions is using sequence prediction that is typically the improved compact prediction tree (CPT+). However, to increase this method's effectiveness, combining it with at least other methods is necessary. This work investigates such PageRank-based methods related to sequence prediction as All-K-Markov, DG, Markov 1st, CPT, CPT+. The experimental results proved that the integration of CPT+ and PageRank is the right solution for next page prediction in terms of accuracy, which is more than a standard method of approximately 0.0621%. Still, the size of the newly created sequence database is reduced up to 35%. Furthermore, our proposed solution has an accuracy that is much higher than other ones. It is intriguing for the next phase (testing one) to make the next page prediction in terms of time performance

Space-Efficient Predictive Block Management

With growing disk and storage capacities, the amount of required metadata for tracking all blocks in a system becomes a daunting task by itself. In previous work, we have demonstrated a system software effort in the area of predictive data grouping for reducing power and latency on hard disks. The structures used, very similar to prior efforts in prefetching and prefetch caching, track access successor information at the block level, keeping a fixed number of immediate successors per block. While providing powerful predictive expansion capabilities and being more space efficient in the amount of required metadata than many previous strategies, there remains a growing concern of how much data is actually required. In this paper, we present a novel method of storing equivalent information, SESH, a Space Efficient Storage of Heredity. This method utilizes the high amount of block-level predictability observed in a number of workload trace sets to reduce the overall metadata storage by up to 99% without any loss of information. As a result, we are able to provide a predictive tool that is adaptive, accurate, and robust in the face of workload noise, for a tiny fraction of the metadata cost previously anticipated; in some cases, reducing the required size from 12 gigabytes to less than 150 megabytes

Dynamic data shapers optimize performance in Dynamic Binary Optimization (DBO) environment

Processor hardware has been architected with the assumption that most data access patterns would be linearly spatial in nature. But, most applications involve algorithms that are designed with optimal efficiency in mind, which results in non-spatial, multi-dimensional data access. Moreover, this data view or access pattern changes dynamically in different program phases. This results in a mismatch between the processor hardware\u27s view of data and the algorithmic view of data, leading to significant memory access bottlenecks. This variation in data views is especially more pronounced in applications involving large datasets, leading to significantly increased latency and user response times. Previous attempts to tackle this problem were primarily targeted at execution time optimization. We present a dynamic technique piggybacked on the classical dynamic binary optimization (DBO) to shape the data view for each program phase differently resulting in program execution time reduction along with reductions in access energy. Our implementation rearranges non-adjacent data into a contiguous dataview. It uses wrappers to replace irregular data access patterns with spatially local dataview. HDTrans, a runtime dynamic binary optimization framework has been used to perform runtime instrumentation and dynamic data optimization to achieve this goal. This scheme not only ensures a reduced program execution time, but also results in lower energy use. Some of the commonly used benchmarks from the SPEC 2006 suite were profiled to determine irregular data accesses from procedures which contributed heavily to the overall execution time. Wrappers built to replace these accesses with spatially adjacent data led to a significant improvement in the total execution time. On average, 20% reduction in time was achieved along with a 5% reduction in energy

DDG: An Efficient Prefetching Algorithm for Current Web Generation

Abstract — Web prefetching is one of the techniques proposed to reduce user’s perceived latencies in the World Wide Web. The spatial locality shown by user’s accesses makes it possible to predict future accesses based on the previous ones. A prefetching engine uses these predictions to prefetch the web objects before the user demands them. The existing prediction algorithms achieved an acceptable performance when they were proposed but the high increase in the amount of embedded objects per page has reduced their effectiveness in the current web. In this paper we show that most of the predictions made by the existing algorithms are useless to reduce the user’s perceived latency because these algorithms do not take into account how current web pages are structured, i.e., an HTML object with several embedded objects. Thus, they predict the accesses to the embedded objects in an HTML after reading the HTML itself. For this reason, the prediction advance is not enough to prefetch the objects and therefore there is no latency reduction. As a result of a wide analysis of the behaviour of the most commonly used algorithms, in this paper we present the DDG algorithm that distinguishes between container objects (HTML) and embedded objects to create a new prediction model according to the structure of the current web. Results show that, for the same amount of extra requests to the server, DDG always outperforms the existing algorithms by reducing the perceived latency between 15 % and 150 % more without increasing the computing complexity. I