Paper
Niki C. Thornock, Xiao-Hong Tu, and J. Kelly Flanagan. A stochastic disk
i/o simulation technique. In Proc. of Winter Simulation Conference
97, pages 1079-1086, December 1997.
Abstract
Processor speeds continue to increase while disk I/O speeds lag far
behind. This mismatch causes an I/O bottleneck reducing the performance
of systems running I/O intensive applications. There is a need to model
these types of systems to determine and quantify the performance impact of
alternative designs.
In this paper, we describe a technique to construct accurate stochastic
simulation models from acquired trace data. The resulting simulation
models accept input trace data and return estimates of disk request
service times. In addition, we describe a trace collection technique
capable of collecting accurate trace data from Novell Netware servers.
These traces are used to construct a simulation model of a Novell Netware
I/O subsystem. This simulator is evaluted and found to be an accurate
predictor of disk service times.