Performance Analysis of Virtual Disk System for Transparent Computing

TransCom is a transparent computing platform based on a virtual disk system that supports heterogeneous services of the operating platform and their above applications. In TransCom, OS and software which run in the client are stored on the centralized servers, while computing tasks are carried out by the clients, so the server is the bottleneck of the system performance. This paper analyzes the characteristics of its real usage workload and builds a queuing model to locate the system bottlenecks. According to the study, the disk is the primary bottleneck if the cache hit ratio is less than 90%, so an optimal cache arrangement policy is developed on both the server and the client, which aims to avoid most of the server disk accesses. Experiment results show that the appropriate cache arrangement can significantly improve the capability of the TransCom server.