Using Dynamic Sets to Overcome High I/O Latencies During Search

David Steere, M. Satyanarayanan

Abstract

In this paper we describe a single unifying abstraction called dynamic sets which can offer substantial benefits to search applications. These benefits include greater opportunity in the I/O subsystem to aggressively exploit prefetching and parallelism, as well as support for associative naming to complement the hierarchical naming in typical file systems. This paper motivates dynamic sets and presents the design of a system that embodies this abstraction.