Evaluating the effect of online data compression on the disk cache of a mass storage system
Odysseas I. Pentakalos, Yelena Yesha · NASA Technical Reports Server (NASA) · 1994
A Unix based mass storage file system which provides access to the stored data only through the ftp protocol has provided the incentive to examine the performance of inserting an online data compression algorithm at each client in order to increase the effective capacity of the storage system. Two online compression algorithms were tested, namely the Ziv-Lempel (gzip) and LZW (compress) algorithms, using both a sequential and a pipelined implementation. Their performance was compared based on their execution time and the compression ratio attained for different types of files. 1 Introduction Mass storage systems are used in research environments for storing data generated by scientific simulations and satelite observations in amounts on the order of terabytes. The cost of storage devices of that capacity is still very high while the rate of increase in disk space requirements by the users grows continuously. This problem is especially evident in scientific research centers where enor...