Feedback Based Dynamic Proportion Allocation for Disk I/O

In this paper we propose to use feedback control to automatically allocate disk bandwidth in order to match the rate of disk I/O to the real-rate \cite{Steere99} needs of applications. We describe a model for adaptive resource management based on measuring the relative progress of stages in a producer-consumer pipeline. We show how to use prefetching to transform a passive disk into an active data producer whose progress can be controlled via feedback. Our progress-based framework allows the integrated control of multiple resources. The resulting system automatically adapts to varying application rates as well as to varying device latencies.