@InProceedings{ellis:prefetch,
  author = {Carla Schlatter Ellis and David Kotz},
  title = {Prefetching in File Systems for {MIMD} Multiprocessors},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1989 International Conference on Parallel
  Processing},
  year = {1989},
  month = {August},
  pages = {I:306--314},
  publisher = {Pennsylvania State Univ. Press},
  copyright = {Pennsylvania State Univ. Press},
  address = {St. Charles, IL},
  earlier = {ellis:prefetchTR},
  later = {kotz:prefetch},
  keywords = {dfk, parallel file system, prefetching, disk caching, MIMD,
  parallel I/O, pario-bib},
  abstract = {The problem of providing file I/O to parallel programs has been
  largely neglected in the development of multiprocessor systems. There are two
  essential elements of any file system design intended for a highly parallel
  environment: parallel I/O and effective caching schemes. This paper
  concentrates on the second aspect of file system design and specifically, on
  the question of whether prefetching blocks of the file into the block cache
  can effectively reduce overall execution time of a parallel computation, even
  under favorable assumptions. \par Experiments have been conducted with an
  interleaved file system testbed on the Butterfly Plus multiprocessor. Results
  of these experiments suggest that 1) the hit ratio, the accepted measure in
  traditional caching studies, may not be an adequate measure of performance
  when the workload consists of parallel computations and parallel file access
  patterns, 2) caching with prefetching can significantly improve the hit ratio
  and the average time to perform an I/O operation, and 3) an improvement in
  overall execution time has been observed in most cases. In spite of these
  gains, prefetching sometimes results in increased execution times (a negative
  result, given the optimistic nature of the study). \par We explore why is it
  not trivial to translate savings on individual I/O requests into consistently
  better overall performance and identify the key problems that need to be
  addressed in order to improve the potential of prefetching techniques in this
  environment.}
}