CSR: Small: Wisconsin Next Generation benchmarks (WiNG)

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Benchmarking file and storage systems is challenging. The Wisconsin Next Generation Benchmarks (WiNG) project aims to provide tools and techniques to simplify the benchmarking of file and storage systems, particularly at large scales and storage capacities. The WiNG project solves three current problems in benchmarking file systems. First, the performance of file systems can be extremely sensitive to the initial allocation of files on disk. Our Impressions framework helps evaluators to easily and quickly create representative, reproducible file system images to initialize the system under test. Second, evaluators want to understand how file systems perform on large data sets; unfortunately, it can be costly to acquire the necessary storage capacity and time consuming to run the workloads. Compressions helps with scale: it enables users to benchmark extremely large data sets using significantly smaller storage systems and for some scenarios reduces benchmark running time by orders of magnitude. Third, evaluators rarely have the expertise to set up and run an interesting range of representative applications. Insight enables users to easily create and run synthetic workloads representative of more complex applications. In summary, WiNG enables developers to evaluate file systems on applications that real users care about. WiNG is developing benchmarking infrastructure and source code that can and will be used by the file system community. WiNG gives graduate students hands-on training with cutting-edge systems technology. Finally, for outreach to the wider community, WiNG enables an undergraduate to work with elementary-school children in the Scratch programming environment.