A principled approach for selecting block I/O traces

Abstract

We present IOTap, a tool that analyzes and profiles block I/O traces. IOTap computes the (dis)similarities among a set of workloads and sets a guideline for selecting a subset of traces for benchmarking. By doing so, we avoid experimentally running all workloads or, even worse, arbitrarily selecting a subset that skews the results. We demonstrate the usefulness of IOTap by comparing its results with experiments on real SSDs, achieving a high correlation of 0.92 for an NVMe SSD.