Paragone: What's next in block I/O trace modeling

Designers of storage and file systems use I/O traces to emulate application workloads while designing new algorithms and for testing bug fixes. However, since traces are large, they are hard to store and moreover inflexible to manipulate. Thus, researchers have proposed techniques to create trace models in order to alleviate these concerns. However, the prior trace modeling approaches are limited with respect to 1) number of trace parameters they can model, and hence, the accuracy of the model and 2) with respect to manipulating the trace model in both temporal and spatial domains (that is, changing the burstiness of a workload, or scaling the size of the data supporting the workload). In this paper we present a new algorithm/tool called Paragone that addresses the above mentioned problems by fundamentally re-thinking how traces should be modeled and replayed.