A new approach in the modeling and generation of synthetic disk workload

Synthesizing representative I/O workloads using iterative distillation

“…The literature describes and evaluates many techniques for generating synthetic block-level I/O workloads [11,12,13,15,16,24,25], file-level workloads [1,6,14,22], and application-level I/Os workloads [18]. File-and application-level synthesis techniques are important because they can be used to produce block-level workloads.…”

“…Jump distance within state calculates the jump distance between the beginning of the current request, and the end of the most recent request corresponding to the same state as the current request. For example, consider the following sequence of locations: 10,11,12,20,21,13,22,14,23,24,15. Assume each request size is 1 unit, and define states [10,19] and [20,29].…”

“…Most current workload analysis and synthesis techniques [11,12,13,15,16,24,25]. attempt to reproduce only one or two important workload properties.…”

Using the distiller to direct the development of self-configuration software

“…Researchers have proposed many metrics for quantifying workload characteristics [4,6,7,8,13,14,16]; however, selecting a set of metrics that captures precisely those aspects of a workload that should be compared and/or analyzed currently requires a trial-and-error process that, until recently, has been impractically tedious.…”

“…The Distiller is unique because, instead of attempting to preserve a set of attributes chosen a priori, it searches through a set of previously developed and studied attributes and generation techniques (e.g., [4,5,6,7,8,13,14,16]) then chooses those attributes that are most appropriate for the target workload and storage system under test. These existing techniques serve as the Distiller's library.…”