Power and performance in I/O for scientific applications

The I/O patterns of large scale scientific applications can often be characterized as small, non-contiguous, and regular. From a performance and power perspective, this is perhaps the worse kind of I/O for a disk. Two approaches to mitigating the mechanical limitations of disks are write-back caches and software-directed power management. Previous distributed caches are plagued by synchronization and scalability issues. The direct access cache: DAChe system is a user-level distributed cached that addresses both these problems. Past work on managing disk power during run time were effective, one should be able to improve on those results by adopting a proactive scheme.