====== Non-blocking Writes ======

===== Authors =====

  * [[http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~dcamp020/|Daniel Campello]]
  * [[http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~hlope048/|Hector Lopez]]
  * [[http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~lusec001/|Luis Useche]]
  * [[http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~rkoll001/|Ricardo Koller]]
  * [[http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~raju/|Raju Rangaswami]]
===== Abstract =====

Writing data to a page not present in the file-system page cache causes the operating system to synchronously fetch the page into memory before it can be written into. {\em Synchronous} page fetch defines both policy (//when//) and mechanism (//how//). However, its //read-before-write// behavior blocks the writing process. Non-blocking writes eliminate such blocking by buffering the written data elsewhere in memory and unblocking the writing process immediately. Subsequent //reads// to the updated page locations are also made non-blocking. This new handling of writes to non-cached pages allow processes to overlap more computation with I/O and improves page fetch I/O throughput by increasing fetch parallelism.
===== Publications =====

  *  **Non-blocking Writes to Files** {{nbw-fast15.pdf|pdf}}\\ Daniel Campello, Hector Lopez, Luis Useche, Ricardo Koller, and Raju Rangaswami\\ Proceedings of USENIX File and Storage Technologies (FAST), February, 2015.


===== Public Software =====

  * [[projects:nbw:traces:start|Traces used in the paper titled "Non-blocking Writes to Files", Proceedings of USENIX FAST 2015.]]

===== Acknowledgement of Support =====

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-1320426 and by a NetApp Faculty Fellowship.