ABSTRACT

Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '04). San Francisco, CA. March 31, 2004. Supercedes Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-03-101, December, 2003.

Atropos: A Disk Array Volume Manager for Orchestrated Use of Disks

Jiri Schindler, Steven W. Schlosser, Minglong Shao, Anastassia Ailamaki, Gregory R. Ganger

Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

The Atropos logical volume manager allows applications to exploit characteristics of its underlying collection of disks. It stripes data in track-sized units and explicitly exposes the boundaries, allowing applications to maximize efficiency for sequential access patterns even when they share the array. Further, it supports efficient diagonal access to blocks on adjacent tracks, allowing applications to orchestrate the layout and access of two-dimensional data structures, such as relational database tables, to maximize performance for both row-based and column-based accesses.

KEYWORDS: Disk arrays, disk performance, database access

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