@Article{triantafillou:overlay,
  author = {Peter Triantafillou and Christos Faloutsos},
  title = {Overlay striping and optimal parallel {I/O} for modern
  applications},
  journal = {Parallel Computing},
  year = {1998},
  month = {January},
  volume = {24},
  number = {1},
  pages = {21--43},
  URL = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8191(97)00115-4},
  keywords = {parallel I/O, striping, pario-bib},
  abstract = {Disk array systems are rapidly becoming the secondary-storage
  media of choice for many emerging applications with large storage and high
  bandwidth requirements. Striping data across the disks of a disk array
  introduces significant performance benefits mainly because the effective
  transfer rate of the secondary storage is increased by a factor equal to the
  stripe width. However, the choice of the optimal stripe width is an open
  problem: no general formal analysis has been reported and intuition alone
  fails to provide good guidelines. As a result one may find occasionally
  contradictory recommendations in the literature. With this work we first
  contribute an analytical calculation of the optimal stripe width. Second, we
  recognize that the optimal stripe width is sensitive to the multiprogramming
  level, which is not known a priori and fluctuates with time. Thus,
  calculations of the optimal stripe width are, by themselves only, of little
  practical use. For this reason we propose a novel striping technique, called
  overlay striping, which allows objects to be retrieved using a number of
  alternative stripe widths. We provide the detailed algorithms for our overlay
  striping method and we study the associated storage overhead and performance
  improvements and we show that we can achieve near optimal performance for
  very wide ranges of the possible multiprogramming levels, while incurring
  small storage overheads.},
  comment = {Part of a special issue.}
}