Abstract
Parallel disks promise to be a cost effective means for achieving high bandwidth in applications involving massive data sets, but algorithms for parallel disks can be difficult to devise. To combat this problem, we define a useful and natural duality between writing to parallel disks and the seemingly more difficult problem of prefetching. We first explore this duality for applications involving read-once accesses using parallel disks. We get a simple linear time algorithm for computing optimal prefetch schedules and analyze the efficiency of the resulting schedules for randomly placed data and for arbitrary interleaved accesses to striped sequences. Duality also provides an optimal schedule for the integrated caching and prefetching problem, in which blocks can be accessed multiple times. Another application of this duality gives us the first parallel disk sorting algorithms that are provably optimal up to lower order terms. One of these algorithms is a simple and practical variant of multiway merge sort, addressing a question that has been open for some time.
Supported in part by the NSF through research grant CCR-0082986.
Partially supported by the IST Programme of the EU under contract number IST-1999-14186 (ALCOM-FT)
Supported in part by the NSF through research grants CCR-9877133 and EIA-9870724 and by the ARO through MURI grant DAAH04-96-1-0013
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hutchinson, D.A., Sanders, P., Vitter, J.S. (2001). Duality between Prefetching and Queued Writing with Parallel Disks. In: auf der Heide, F.M. (eds) Algorithms — ESA 2001. ESA 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2161. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44676-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44676-1_5
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