Improving the SSD Performance by Exploiting Request Characteristics and Internal Parallelism

With the explosive growth in the data volume, the I/O bottleneck has become an increasingly daunting challenge for big data analytics. It is urgent and important to introduce high-performance flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into the storage systems. However, since the existing systems are primarily designed for conventional magnetic hard disk drives, directly incorporating SSDs in the existing systems cannot fully exploit SSDs’ performance advantages. In this paper, we propose a new I/O scheduler for SSDs, namely Amphibian, that exploits the high-level request characteristics and low-level parallelism of flash chips to improve the performance of SSD-based storage systems. Amphibian includes two performance enhancement schemes: 1) size-based request ordering, which prioritizes requests with small sizes in processing and 2) garbage collection (GC)-aware request dispatching that delays issuing requests to flash chips that are in the GC state. These two schemes employed in Amphibian significantly reduce the average waiting times of the requests from the host. Our extensive evaluation results derived from three types of SSDs show that, compared with the existing I/O schedulers, Amphibian greatly improves both throughput and average response times for SSD-based storage systems, thus improving the I/O performance of the systems.