Development of Linux file access policies for data-intensive applications

Abstract

[ENGLISH]

Our world has been going through a digitization process for some decades now, with thetransformation curve being sharper in the last few years. The rise of this new digital societybrings with it a huge amount of information, and so it is paramount to create new architec-tures and hardware devices capable of storing and analyzing such information in a reason-able time. The advancements in some fields such as persistent storage is notable, while inother fields such as RAM some extra work must be done to counter the lack of physical im-provement. For example, NVMe discs offer high transfer speeds and low latency in data accesswhile offering high capacities and moderate price points. The RAM, on the other hand, hasadvanced less, being the transfer rates the only improved factor, letting both memory capac-ity and prices almost intact. This results in data intensive systems with insufficient RAM thatcontinuously have to access disk in order to execute their programs, bringing a significantdegradation of the overall performance. The objective of this project is to analyze means ofoperating with files other than the classic ones, analyzing the data access patterns of a givenapplication and developing a specific disk access policy for it to function with less hassle.Specifically, we will focus on converting one existing program to a new memory-interactingparadigm and developing new mapped-file page replacement policies at kernel level.