File Type and Access Pattern Aware Buffer Cache Management for Rendering Systems

Donghee Shin,Kyungwoon Cho,Hyokyung Bahn

doi:10.3390/electronics9010164

Abstract

Rendering is the process of generating high-resolution images by software, which is widely used in animation, video games and visual effects in movies. Although rendering is a computation-intensive job, we observe that storage accesses may become another performance bottleneck in desktop-rendering systems. In this article, we present a new buffer cache management scheme specialized for rendering systems. Unlike general-purpose computing systems, rendering systems exhibit specific file access patterns, and we show that this results in significant performance degradation in the buffer cache system. To cope with this situation, we collect various file input/output (I/O) traces of rendering workloads and analyze their access patterns. The results of this analysis show that file I/Os in rendering processes consist of long loops for configuration, short loops for texture input, random reads for input, and single-writes for output. Based on this observation, we propose a new buffer cache management scheme for improving the storage performance of rendering systems. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the storage I/O performance by an average of 19% and a maximum of 55% compared to the conventional buffer cache system.

Highlights

Rendering is the process of generating high-resolution photorealistic or non-photorealistic 2D images from 2D or 3D models [1,2,3]
Through experiments using various rendering traces, we show that the proposed buffer cache management scheme has the effect of improving the storage I/O performance by an average of 19%
Unlike previous studies that target all kinds of workloads, in which probabilistic reference characteristics like recency and frequency are mainly exploited, this study focuses on the rendering workloads and analyzes the distinct characteristics of rendering file I/Os, such as long loops, short loops, and single writes for each file type in advance, exploits them in judicious buffer cache management

Summary

Introduction

Rendering is the process of generating high-resolution photorealistic or non-photorealistic 2D images from 2D or 3D models [1,2,3]. Rendering is widely used in animations, video games and visual effects in movies, where more than 24 frames should be generated per second. It is common to use a dedicated cluster machine rather than a desktop PC for rendering processes. Due to the recent advances in multi-core and many-core technologies, the computation unit is becoming increasingly faster. This allows new types of applications using interactive rendering or real-time volume rendering, where rendering for a single frame is completed within a few seconds

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Conclusion