Accession Number:

ADA289354

Title:

A Case for Dynamic Sets in Operating Systems.

Descriptive Note:

Corporate Author:

CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Personal Author(s):

• Steere, David
• Satyanarayanan, M.

Report Date:

1994-11-30

Pagination or Media Count:

20.0

Abstract:

Recent trends have exposed three key problems in todays operating systems. The first is the emergence of IO latency as the dominant factor in the performance of many applications. The second is the need to cope with mobile communication environments where bandwidth and latency may be highly variable. The third is the importance of search activity to locating files of interest in a distributed system. In this paper we describe a single unifying abstraction called dynamic sets which can offer substantial benefits in the solution of these problems. These benefits include greater opportunity in the IO subsystem to aggressively exploit prefetching and parallelism. as well as support for associative naming to complement the hierarchical naming in typical file systems. This paper motivates dynamic sets, presents the design of a system that embodies this abstraction, and evaluates a prototype implementation of the system via measurements and an analytical model.

Descriptors:

• *DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
• *OPERATING SYSTEMS(COMPUTERS)
• DATA BASES
• MATHEMATICAL MODELS
• EXPERIMENTAL DATA
• HOST COMPUTERS
• COMPUTER COMMUNICATIONS
• COMPARISON
• SEMANTICS
• INPUT OUTPUT PROCESSING
• PROTOTYPES
• MOBILE
• SEARCHING
• COMPUTER NETWORKS
• COMPUTER FILES
• COMPUTER PROGRAM VERIFICATION
• DATA LINKS
• BUFFER STORAGE

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software
• Computer Systems

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE