Type of Document	Thesis
Author	Qian, Jin
Author's Email Address	qian@cs.fsu.edu
URN	etd-11012007-220702
Title	A Behind-the-Scenes Story on Applying Cross-Layer Coordination to Disks and RAIDs
Degree	Master of Science
Department	Computer Science, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title An-I Andy Wang Committee Chair Theodore P. Baker Committee Member Xin Yuan Committee Member
Keywords	Cross-Layer Coordination Track-aligned
Date of Defense	2007-10-23
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Coordinating storage components across abstraction layers has demonstrated significant performance gains. However, when applied near the physical storage, this approach relies on exposing and exploiting low-level hardware characteristics, perhaps a large number of them, to cope with complex modern disks and RAIDs. Through implementation and validation of prior research on track-aligned accesses and its incorporation in RAIDs, as well as through experimentation with our proposed queue coordination in RAIDs, we confirmed that cross-layer coordination can indeed yield high performance gains. On the other hand, the effective use of cross-layer coordination involves overcoming several challenges: (1) developing efficient and automated ways to extract and exploit hardware characteristics due to rapidly evolving disks, (2) fostering a greater understanding of the legacy storage data path, so that we can better predict the benefits of low-level optimizations and their intertwined interactions, and (3) inventing efficient and automated ways to tune the low-level parameters.
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