ACM Computing Surveys 28A(4), December 1996, http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~pasquale/SDCR96-IO/MuntzR-PasqualeJ.html. Copyright © 1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. See the permissions statement below.
Abstract: I/O systems are becoming more complex, and must be designed by considering the entire system, end-to-end. We make a number of recommendations to address this problem, including the following. (1) There needs to be more emphasis on tertiary storage and on the whole (multilevel) storage hierarchy in general. (2) We must pay more attention to issues of resource management and availability in the network, especially if network-attached storage devices become more viable. (3) To improve performance, the operating system must give user-level processes more control over the data path between the storage device and the process, or be able to accept and exploit high-level hints about the application's behavior and its most important performance metrics/quality of service. (4) Finally, more emphasis should be placed on content-based or semantic-based compression, where we believe the greatest advances remain ahead of us.Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.2 [Operating Systems]: Storage Management - storage hierarchies; D.4.4 [Operating Systems]: Communications Management - input/output, network communication; B.4.2 [Input/Output and Data Communications]: Input/Output Devices - disks, channels and controllers; E.4 [Data]: Coding and Information Theory - data compaction and compression;
General Terms: Algorithms, Design, Management, Measurement, Performance.
Additional Key Words and Phrases: I/O, communication.