Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Non-Uniform Workloads

Figure 10: Non-Uniform Workloads. PARDA control with $ \cal {L}$ = 40 ms. Six hosts run mixed workloads, with $ \beta $ values $ 2:1:2:1:2:1$ .

\epsfig{figure=plots/sec53-exp5-ws.ps,height=1.6in}

\epsfig{figure=plots/sec53-exp5-lat.ps,height=1.6in}

\epsfig{figure=plots/sec53-exp5-th.ps,height=1.6in}

(a) Window Size (b) Latency (ms) (c) Throughput (IOPS)

To test PARDA and its robustness with mixed workloads, we ran very different workload patterns at the same time from our six hosts. Table 5 presents the uncontrolled case.


Table 5: Uncontrolled access by mixed workloads from six hosts.

Host Size Read Random IOPS Latency (ms)
1 4K 100% 100% 610 51
2 8K 50% 0% 660 48
3 8K 100% 100% 630 50
4 8K 67% 60% 670 47
5 16K 100% 100% 490 65
6 16K 75% 70% 520 60


Next, we enable PARDA with $ \cal {L}$ = 40 ms, and assign shares in a $ 2:1:2:1:2:1$ ratio for hosts 1 through 6 respectively, plotted in Figure 10. Window sizes are differentiated between hosts with different shares. Hosts with more shares reach a window size of 32 (the upper bound, $ w_{max}$ ) and remain there. Other hosts have window sizes close to 19. The average latency observed by the hosts remains close to $ \cal {L}$ , as shown in Figure 10(b). The throughput observed by hosts follows roughly the same pattern as window sizes, but is not always proportional because of array scheduling and block placement issues. We saw similar adaptation in window sizes and latency when we repeated this experiment using $ \cal {L}$ = 30 ms (plots omitted due to space constraints).


Ajay Gulati 2009-01-14