SSA - Superblock-Based Storage Architecture: A New Approach for Boosting I/O Performance

Many of the new I/O architectures like DCD, RAPID cache and LFS focus on improving the disk write performance. However, many I/O intensive applications are read-dominated or generate substantial number of read requests. A large read cache is not always effective and has diminishing returns when its size increases. In this paper the authors present a new storage architecture called Superblock-based Storage Architecture (SSA), to boost both read and write performance. SSA converts several small disk I/O operations into one large request.