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Next: Benchmark applications Up: Automatic I/O Hint Generation Previous: Transforming applications

Experimental evaluation

In this section, we describe our experimental environment, our benchmarks, and our results. The SpecHint tool implements the design described in the previous section by modifying Alpha binaries for Digital UNIX 3.2. Threading to support speculative execution was implemented using Digital UNIX's POSIX-compliant pthreads library.

Our experiments were conducted on an AlphaStation 255 (233MHz processor) with 256MB of main memory running Digital UNIX 3.2g, where the standard Unified Buffer Cache (UBC) manager was replaced with the TIP informed prefetching and caching manager. To facilitate comparison with Patterson's work [Patterson95], the file cache size was set to 12MB. The automatic read-ahead policy, which was invoked by all unhinted read calls, prefetches approximately the same number of blocks as have been sequentially read, up to a maximum of 64 blocks. The I/O system consisted of four HP C2247 disks (15ms average access times) attached by fast-wide-differential SCSI. Data files were striped over these disks by a striping pseudodevice with a striping unit of 64KB. A new file system was created to hold the files used in our experiments. All tests were run with the file cache initially empty. All reported results are averages over five runs. To facilitate comparison with programmer-inserted hints, we reran the manually modified applications [Patterson95] on this testbed.




Fay Chang
Tue Jan 5 18:05:04 EST 1999