Using dynamic sets to reduce the aggregate latency of data access
David C. Steere, Mahadev Satyanarayanan · 1997
Many users of large distributed systems are plagued by high latency when accessing remote data. Latency is particularly problematic for the critical application of search and retrieval, which tends to access many objects and may suffer a long wait for each object accessed. Existing techniques like caching, inferential prefetching, and explicit prefetching are not suited to search, are ineffective at reducing latency for search applications, or greatly increase the complexity of the programming model. This dissertation shows that extending the file system interface to support a new abstraction called dynamic sets can address the problem of latency for search without incurring the penalties of the other techniques. A dynamic set is a lightweight and transitory collection of objects with well-defined semantics. An application creates a dynamic set on-demand to hold the objects it wishes to process. Adding dynamic sets to the system's interface results in two benefits. First, creation of a...