Pei Cao

Assistant Professor

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

telephone: (608) 262-1204
fax: (608) 262-9777
email: cao@cs.wisc.edu
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1995
Interests: Operating systems, storage management, parallel and distributed systems


Research Summary

My research focuses on I/O and storage management in uniprocessor and parallel systems. In particular, I am investigating two techniques to improve file system performance: application-specific replacement policies for the file cache, and aggressive prefetching of file data from the disk. I have developed a system in which the kernel allocates physical pages to individual applications, and each application is responsible for deciding how to use its physical pages for caching and prefetching. The system uses a fair global allocation policy in the kernel, and carefully integrates cache replacement, prefetching and disk scheduling. A prototype implementation on uniprocessor systems has demonstrated that good application-chosen replacement strategies and prefetching information can significantly improve the I/O performance of many applications.

Currently, I am extending these techniques to parallel systems. I am developing integrated caching and prefetching algorithms for parallel disk arrays. In addition, I am investigating the global resource management problems in operating systems.

Sample Recent Publications

A study of integrated prefetching and caching strategies (with E. Felten, A. Karlin, and K. Li), Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, pp. 188-197, 1995.

Implementation and performance of application controlled file cache (with E. Felten and K. Li), Proceedings of the First USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementations, pp. 165-178, 1994.

The TickerTAIP parallel RAID architecture (with S. Lim, S. Venkataraman, and J. Wilkes), ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 236-269, 1994.


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