01/01/2002 09:00 AM
Computer Engineering
Accurate disk workloads are crucial for storage systems design, but I/O traces are difficult to obtain, unwieldy to work with, and unparameterizable. Unfortunately, I/O traces are extremely bursty and difficult to characterize. Although good models of I/O workloads would be extremely useful, traces cannot accurately be modeled using exponential or Poisson arrival times. Much experimental evidence shows that I/O traces are self-similar, which researchers have hoped might help to model bursty traces. In this paper, we show that self- similarity at large time scales does not significantly affect disk behavior with respect to response times. This allows us to generate synthetic arrival patterns at relatively small time scales, improving the accuracy of trace generation. The relative error of our method, with input parameters suitable for the workload, ranges from approximately 8% to 12%.
