News

New Prefetching Scheme Saves Computing Time, Energy

• By Joab Jackson
• 07/09/2008

"The idea is to reduce or eliminate delays," said Igor Crk, who along with Chris Gniady wrote up their findings in the paper "Context-Aware Mechanisms for Reducing Interactive Delays of Energy Management in Disks" (available here in PDF format). Crk presented the team's work at the USENIX conference, held last month in Boston.

The idea is to run a small program that logs user actions and notes which chains of actions typically lead to interactions with the hard disk. For instance, if a user opens a word processing program and then executes a series of keystrokes to open a program, that whole series of actions is a good predictor that the hard drive will need to deliver a file within a few seconds.

"Monitoring user interactions with applications provides an opportunity for predicting upcoming power mode transitions and, as a result, eliminating the delays associated with these transitions," the paper states.

The team wrote a program that, when sensing a sequence of actions that typically leads to hard-drive use, will issue a command to the hard drive to spin-up. So, by the time the user actually requests the file, the hard drive, already up and running, can serve it up immediately.

Prefetching is already quite widely used in many systems, but in most of these approaches, the hard drive is activated whenever a user does anything at all on a computer. Only when the user does not interact with the computer at all for a set period of time does the disk power down. Crk explained that this approach is not as efficient insofar as the hard drive stays powered on for long periods of time while nothing is actually written or read from the disk.

The team's approach accurately predicted hard-drive usage 79 percent of the time, and incorrectly predicting usage only 2 percent of the time. As a result, this approach "is able to reduce spin-up delays on average by 35 percent (over 3 seconds), while maintaining low energy consumption," according to the paper. By contrast, traditional prefetching predicted hard drive use 81 percent of the time, though incorrectly predicted usage 52 percent of the time, making that approach much more energy-intensive.

Crk, speaking with this reporter after the presentation, noted that context-aware prefetching could be easily implemented in most operating systems. Most all commercial hard drives have commands that be be evoked to spin up disks. Crk explained that the program they created consumed very little in the way of CPU resources, so it would go unnoticed by users (it is available here for those willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement and agree to only use for the software for non-commercial purposes).

Crk also said that this technique could also be used with wireless cards as well, which could help save battery life on mobile and laptop computers. The idea would be the same, though the program would wake up the wireless communications card rather than the hard drive.

USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, is a non-profit association for technicians, scientists, systems administrators and engineers to share information on developments in the field of computer science.