A Practical Realization of Parallel Disks

Several models of parallel disks are found in the literature. These models have been proposed to alleviate the I/O bottleneck arising in handling voluminous data. These models have the general theme of assuming multiple disks. For instance the Parallel Disk Systems (PDS) model assumes D disks and a single computer. It is also assumed that a block of data from each of the D disks can be fetched into the main memory in one parallel I/O operation. In this paper we present a more practical model for multiple disks and evaluate it experimentally. This model is called a Parallel Machine with Disks (PMD). A PMD can be thought of as a realization of the PDS model. A PMD can also be considered as a special case of the hierarchical memory models proposed in the literature. We investigate the sorting problem on the new model. Our analysis demonstrates the practicality of the PMD. We also present experimental confirmation of this aasertion with data from our implementations.