Abstract
Application launch performance is of great importance to system platform developers and vendors as it greatly affects the degree of users' satisfaction. The single most effective way to improve application launch performance is to replace a hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD), which has recently become affordable and popular. A natural question is then whether or not to replace the traditional HDD-aware application launchers with a new SSD-aware optimizer. We address this question by analyzing the inefficiency of the HDD-aware application launchers on SSDs and then proposing a new SSD-aware application prefetching scheme, called the Fast Application STarter (FAST). The key idea of FAST is to overlap the computation (CPU) time with the SSD access (I/O) time during an application launch. FAST is composed of a set of user-level components and system debugging tools provided by the Linux OS (operating system). In addition, FAST uses a system-call wrapper to automatically detect application launches. Hence, FAST can be easily deployed in any recent Linux versions without kernel recompilation. We implemented FAST on a desktop PC with a SSD running Linux 2.6.32 OS and evaluated it by launching a set of widely-used applications, demonstrating an average of 28% reduction of application launch time as compared to PC without a prefetcher.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of FAST 2011 |
| Subtitle of host publication | 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies |
| Publisher | USENIX Association |
| Pages | 259-272 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781931971829 |
| State | Published - 2011 |
| Event | 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2011 - San Jose, United States Duration: 15 Feb 2011 → 17 Feb 2011 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of FAST 2011: 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies |
|---|
Conference
| Conference | 9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2011 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | San Jose |
| Period | 15/02/11 → 17/02/11 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We deeply appreciate Prof. Heonshik Shin for his support and providing research facility. We also thank our shepherd Arkady Kanevsky, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments that improved this paper. This research was supported by WCU (World Class University) program through National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (R33-10085), and RP-Grant 2010 of Ewha Womans University. Sangsoo Park is the corresponding author (email: [email protected]).