A Workflow-Aware Storage System: An Opportunity Study
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2012 papers
Abstract
This paper evaluates the potential gains a workflow-aware storage system can bring. Two observations make us believe such storage system is crucial to efficiently support workflow-based applications: First, workflows generate irregular and application-dependent data access patterns. These patterns render existing storage systems unable to harness all optimization opportunities as this often requires conflicting optimization options or even conflicting design decision at the level of the storage system. Second, when scheduling, workflow runtime engines make suboptimal decisions as they lack detailed data location information. This paper discusses the feasibility, and evaluates the potential performance benefits brought by, building a workflow-aware storage system that supports per-file access optimizations and exposes data location. To this end, this paper presents approaches to determine the application-specific data access patterns, and evaluates experimentally the performance gains of a workflow-aware storage approach. Our evaluation using synthetic benchmarks shows that a workflow-aware storage system can bring significant performance gains: up to 7× performance gain compared to the distributed storage system - MosaStore and up to 16× compared to a central, well provisioned, NFS server.
Related Papers
- → The Design and Implementation of XML-based Workflow Engine(2007)10 cited
- Static approach for process pattern-based workflow planning(2011)
- Research Workflow System Based on Workflow Engine Shark(2009)
- Research and Application of Embedded Workflow Engine-based Workflow Management System(2006)
- Research and Design of Lightweight Workflow Engine(2010)