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FAST '04 — Abstract
Pp. 45-58 of the Proceedings
Buttress: A toolkit for flexible and high fidelity I/O benchmarking
Eric Anderson, Mahesh Kallahalla, Mustafa Uysal, and Ram Swaminathan, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Abstract
In benchmarking I/O systems, it is important to generate,
accurately,
the I/O access pattern that one is intending to generate. However,
timing
accuracy ( issuing I/Os at the desired time) at high I/O rates is
difficult
to achieve on stock operating systems. We currently lack tools to
easily
and accurately generate complex I/O workloads on modern storage
systems. As
a result, we may be introducing substantial errors in observed system
metrics when we benchmark I/O systems using inaccurate tools for
replaying
traces or for producing synthetic workloads with known inter-arrival
times.
In this paper, we demonstrate the need for timing accuracy for I/O
benchmarking in the context of replaying I/O traces. We also
quantitatively
characterize the impact of error in issuing I/Os on measured system
parameters. For instance, we show that the error in perceived I/O
response
times can be as much as +350% or -15% by using naive benchmarking tools
that have timing inaccuracies. To address this problem, we present
Buttress, a portable and flexible toolkit that can generate
I/O
workloads with microsecond accuracy at the I/O throughputs of high-end
enterprise storage arrays. In particular, Buttress can issue I/O
requests
within 100µs of the desired issue time even at rates of 10000
I/Os
per second (IOPS).
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