Automatic I/O prefetching for out-of-core applications
Angela K. Demke · Library and Archives Canada (Government of Canada) · 1997
Automatic I/O Prefetching for Out-of-Core Applications Angela K. Demke Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1997 In this thesis, we propose and evaluate a fully-automatic technique to manage the I/O requirements of out-of-core scientific applications. In our scheme, the compiler determines information on future access patterns and inserts prefetch and release operations to initiate I/O before the data is needed and to free pages that are no longer accessed. No modifications to the original application source code are needed to support our compiler analysis. The operating system provides support for the basic prefetch and release operations and interacts with a run-time layer to accelerate performance by minimizing prefetch overhead. We have implemented our scheme using the SUIF compiler and the Hurricane operating system. Our experimental results demonstrate that our fully-automatic scheme effectively hides the I/O latency in out-of-cor...