The Fractal Structure of Data Reference: Applications to the Memory Hierarchy

The architectural concept of a memory hierarchy has been immensely successful, making possible today's spectacular pace of technology evolution in both the volume of data and the speed of data access. Its success is difficult to understand, however, when examined within the traditional 'memoryless' framework of performance analysis. The 'memoryless' framework cannot properly reflect a memory hierarchy's ability to take advantage of patterns of data use that are transient. This work both introduces, and justifies empirically, an alternative modelling framework in which arrivals are driven by a statistically self-similar underlying process, and are transient in nature. The substance of this book comes from the ability of the model to impose a mathematically tractable structure on important problems involving the operation and performance of a memory hierarchy. It describes events as they play out at a wide range of time scales, from the operation of file buffers and storage control cache, to a statistical view of entire disk storage applications.