Dynamic Helper Threaded Prefetching on the Multi-Core Software RAID

• Main Authors: Yu-Chen Wu, 吳宇宸
• Other Authors: Yeh-Ching Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21908751165859832645

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 95 === As the cost of hard disks decreases, it has become more common for people to use RAID. The RAID provides higher performance or higher security to users. Software RAID is the most economical way to own a RAID. Today, most processors of home and business computers are sufficient to provide this processing power. The developing trends of processors are “Multi-core” now. Hence, the software RAID runs on multi-core processors should be a trend in the future. However, most software RAID implementations are designed for single-core processor and the implementations do not utilize the power of the multi-core processor properly. The performances of the systems that access disks frequently are limited by the storage systems. In order to reduce the bottleneck, we should utilize the power of multi-core processor to enhance the performance of the storage system. In this thesis, we propose a prefetching mechanism on the multi-core software RAID. We use the multi-core processor and the high speed main memory to enhance the performance of reading on a RAID. All our designs are implemented in a helper thread and the helper thread will dynamically profile the user’s behavior and prefetch possible data. The simulation results demonstrate that our design can enhance the performance of read operator on a system that a data have high correlation between other data.