A Server of Distributed Disk Pages Using a Configurable Software Bus

Abstract

As network latency drops below disk latency, access time to a remote disk will begin to approach local disk access time. The performance of I/O may then be improved by spreading disk pages across several remote disk servers and accessing disk pages in parallel. To research this we have prototyped a data page server called a Page File. This persistent data type provides a set of methods to access disk pages stored on a cluster of remote machines acting as disk servers. The goal is to improve the throughput of database management system or other I/O intensive application by accessing pages from remote disks and incurring disk latency in parallel. This report describes the conceptual foundation and the methods of access for our prototype. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-93-47)