Pipette: efficient fine-grained reads for SSDs

Big data applications, such as recommendation system and social network, often generate a huge number of fine-grained reads to the storage. Block-oriented storage devices tend to suffer from these fine-grained read operations in terms of I/O traffic as well as performance. Motivated by this challenge, a fine-grained read framework, Pipette, is proposed in this paper, as an extension to the traditional I/O framework. With an adaptive caching design, Pipette framework offers a tremendous reduction in I/O traffic as well as achieves significant performance gain. A Pipette prototype was implemented with Ext4 file system on an SSD for two real-world applications, where the I/O throughput is improved by 31.6% and 33.5%, and the I/O traffic is reduced by 95.6% and 93.6%, respectively.