earticle

영어

In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme that can efficiently serve I/O requests having deadlines in flash storage. The I/O requests with deadlines, namely, real-time requests, are assumed to be issued for streaming services of continuous media. Since a Web-based streaming server commonly supports downloads of HTMLs or images, we also aim to quickly process non-real-time I/O requests, together with real-time ones. For this purpose, we adopt the well-known rate-reservation EDF (RR-EDF) algorithm for determining scheduling priorities among mixed I/O requests. In fact, for the use of an EDF-style algorithm, overhead of task’s switching should be low and predictable, as with its application of CPU scheduling. In other words, the EDF algorithm is inherently unsuitable for scheduling I/O requests in HDD storage because of highly varying latency times of HDD. Unlike HDD, time for reading a block in flash storage is almost uniform with respect to its physical location. This is because flash storage has no mechanical component, differently from HDD. By capitalizing on this uniform block read time, we compute bandwidth utilization rates of real-time requests from streams. Then, the RR-EDF algorithm is applied for determining how much storage bandwidth can be assigned to non-real-time requests, while meeting deadlines of real-time requests. From this, we can improve the service times of non-real-time requests, which are issued for downloads of static files. Because the proposed scheme can expand flexibly the scheduling periods of streams, it can provide a full usage of slack times, thereby improving the overall throughput of flash storage significantly