Optimally Redundant, Seek-Time Minimizing Data Layout for Interactive Rendering

Abstract

Performance of interactive graphics walkthrough systems depends on the time taken to fetch the required data from the secondary storage to main memory. It has been earlier established that a large fraction of this fetch time is spent on seeking the data on the hard disk. In order to reduce this seek time, redundant data storage has been proposed in the literature, but the redundancy factors of those layouts are prohibitively high. In this paper, we develop a cost model for the seek time of a layout. Based on this cost model, we propose an elegant algorithm that computes a redundant data layout with the redundancy factor that is within the user-specified bounds, while maximizing the performance of the system. By using a set of training access requirements and a set of validation access requirements, our proposed method is able to automatically maximize system performance with an optimal redundancy factor. Experimental results show that the interactive rendering speed of the walkthrough system was improved by a factor of 2---4 by using our data layout method when compared to existing methods with or without redundancy.