@PhdThesis{kotz:thesis,
  author = {David Kotz},
  title = {Prefetching and Caching Techniques in File Systems for {MIMD}
  Multiprocessors},
  year = {1991},
  month = {April},
  school = {Duke University},
  copyright = {David Kotz},
  note = {Available as technical report CS-1991-016},
  URL = {http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/papers/kotz:thesis.ps.gz},
  URLpdf = {http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/papers/kotz:thesis.pdf},
  keywords = {dfk, parallel file system, prefetching, MIMD, disk caching,
  parallel I/O, pario-bib},
  abstract = {The increasing speed of the most powerful computers, especially
  multiprocessors, makes it difficult to provide sufficient I/O bandwidth to
  keep them running at full speed for the largest problems. Trends show that
  the difference in the speed of disk hardware and the speed of processors is
  increasing, with I/O severely limiting the performance of otherwise fast
  machines. This widening access-time gap is known as the ``I/O bottleneck
  crisis.'' One solution to the crisis, suggested by many researchers, is to
  use many disks in parallel to increase the overall bandwidth. \par This
  dissertation studies some of the file system issues needed to get high
  performance from parallel disk systems, since parallel hardware alone cannot
  guarantee good performance. The target systems are large MIMD multiprocessors
  used for scientific applications, with large files spread over multiple disks
  attached in parallel. The focus is on automatic caching and prefetching
  techniques. We show that caching and prefetching can transparently provide
  the power of parallel disk hardware to both sequential and parallel
  applications using a conventional file system interface. We also propose a
  new file system interface (compatible with the conventional interface) that
  could make it easier to use parallel disks effectively. \par Our methodology
  is a mixture of implementation and simulation, using a software testbed that
  we built to run on a BBN GP1000 multiprocessor. The testbed simulates the
  disks and fully implements the caching and prefetching policies. Using a
  synthetic workload as input, we use the testbed in an extensive set of
  experiments. The results show that prefetching and caching improved the
  performance of parallel file systems, often dramatically.},
  comment = {Published as kotz:prefetch, kotz:jwriteback, kotz:jpractical,
  kotz:fsint2.}
}