Flashy prefetching for high-performance flash drives

While hard drives hold on to the capacity advantage, flash-based solid-state drives (SSD) with high bandwidth and low latency have become good alternatives for I/O-intensive applications. Traditional data prefetching has been primarily designed to improve I/O performance on hard drives. The same techniques, if applied unchanged on flash drives, are likely to either fail to fully utilize SSDs, or interfere with application I/O requests, both of which could result in undesirable application performance. In this work, we demonstrate that data prefetching, when effectively harnessing the high performance of SSDs, can provide significant performance benefits for a wide range of data-intensive applications. The new technique, flashy prefetching, consists of accurate prediction of application needs in runtime and adaptive feedback-directed prefetching that scales with application needs, while being considerate to underlying storage devices. We have implemented a real system in Linux and evaluated it on four different SSDs. The results show 65-70% prefetching accuracy and an average 20% speedup on LFS, web search engine traces, BLAST, and TPC-H like benchmarks across various storage drives.