My dissertation

Related pointers:

• A shortened version of the work was published in Sigmetrics '98. An analytic behavior model for disk drives with readahead caches and request reordering.
• one-page overview.
• 2-up, single spaced version of my dissertation.
• announcement of my dissertation defense (gives an overview of my work).

• slides for the Sigmetrics '98 talk given on 6/26/98. This is a shortened version of the NEC talk.
• slides for a talk given at NEC on 8/11/97, presenting my dissertation work. This is an updated version of the dissertation defense.
• cover sheet/slides used for my dissertation defense given in 1/97.

My disk model

I developed an analytic performance model of a SCSI disk that determines the service time of a request in a workload-specific method. The inputs into the model are the workload use patterns and a specification of the disk. Two implementations of the model are available: in Tcl, and in C, along with the multiple disk model.

Uses of the disk model

One use of such my model is self-managing, self-configuring storage systems. These types of storage systems are discussed in an MSIO paper and OSDI work-in-progress paper.

Extensions to the disk model

I might have done some (prehaps unpublished) work on the following extensions to the disk model:

• modeling disk arrays
• supporting multiple workloads on a device
• improving the approximation for the partial hit probability of the model for the disk cache
• modeling multiple disks on a SCSI bus.