  My research focuses on I/O and storage management in uniprocessor and parallel systems.  In particular, I am investigating two techniques to improve file system performance: application-specific replacement policies for the file cache, and aggressive prefetching of file data from the disk.  I have developed a system in which the kernel allocates physical pages to individual applications, and each application is responsible for deciding how to use its physical pages for caching and prefetching.  The system uses a fair global allocation policy in the kernel, and carefully integrates cache replacement, prefetching and disk scheduling.  A prototype implementation on uniprocessor systems has demonstrated that good application-chosen replacement strategies and prefetching information can significantly improve the I/O performance of many applications.  Currently, I am extending these techniques to parallel systems.  I am developing integrated caching and prefetching algorithms for parallel disk arrays.  In addition, I am investigating the global resource management problems in operating systems.  <HR> Last modified: Wed Apr  24 21:38:49 1996 by Pei Cao <ADDRESS>   <A HREF="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~cao/cao.html">cao@cs.wisc.edu</A> </ADDRESS>  </BODY> </HTML>
