Exploiting Non-Determinism in Set Iterators to Reduce I/O Latency
David C. Steere · 1997
A key goal of distributed systems is to provide prompt access to shared information repositories. The high latency of remote access is a serious impediment to this goal. We propose a new file system abstraction called dynamic sets that allows the system to transparently reduce I/O latency without relying on reference locality, without modifying DFS serversand protocols, and without unduly complicating the programming model. We present this abstraction, and describe an implementation of it that runs on local and distributed file systems, as well as the World Wide Web. Substantial performance gains are demonstrated -- up to 50% savings in runtime for search on NFS, and up to 90% reduction in I/O latency for Web searches. 1 Introduction A central problem facing distributed systems is the high latency to access remote data. Latency is problematic because it reduces the benefit typical applications can receive from faster CPUs, and reduces the productivity of users who are forced to wait f...