Abstract
Taking into account the fact that the computer systems, as the implementations of Turing machine, are physical devices, the paper shows considerations in which hard drive behavior will be presented in terms of statistical mechanics. Because computer is a machine, its analysis cannot be based only on mathematical models apart of physical conditions. In the paper it will be presented a very narrow part this problem – an analysis of hard drive behavior in the context of the power-law distributions. We will focus only on four selected hard drive parameters, i.e. the rate of transfer bytes to or from the disk during the read or write, the number of pending requests to the disk and the rate of read operations. Our research was performed under the Windows operating system and this allows to make a statistical analysis for the possible occurrence of power-laws representing the lack of characteristic scale for considered processes. This property will be confirmed in all analyzed cases. A presented study can help describing the behavior of the whole computer system in terms of physics of computer processing.
Highlights
It can be observed that nowadays a high computing power and the great possible efficiency are required from modern computer systems
Taking into account the fact that the computer systems, as the implementations of Turing machine, are physical devices, the paper shows considerations in which hard drive behavior will be presented in terms of statistical mechanics
Our research was performed under the Windows operating system and this allows to make a statistical analysis for the possible occurrence of power-laws representing the lack of characteristic scale for considered processes
Summary
It can be observed that nowadays a high computing power and the great possible efficiency are required from modern computer systems. To be more precise: a hard drive behavior will be described in terms of physical phenomena [8] and their properties but basing on the approach that from one hand will take the hard drive physical properties (a more generally: hardware features) and processed on hard drive tasks (a more generally: software features) This will be done, because if in the complex systems approach we are forced to focus on how each component behaves and acts together with other components in the case of computer systems, for example, we cannot separate the hardware behavior form the software behavior, the network topology from the packets flow, algorithm from the input data, etc. The approach presented in this paper is a continuation of work [8] and can be considered as a further evidence of complex behavior of computer systems the paradigm change for their analysis is needed
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