Impact of SATA Packet Size on Execution Time As
discussed in Section 4.3.1 certain disks show significant
degradation in aggregate disk bandwidth when multiple cores are sharing a single physical disk. We discussed that
one simple solution to increase aggregate disk bandwidth is
to increase the Linux SATA driver packet size. This amortizes the cost of disk head seeks. For disks which show poor
aggregate bandwidth when shared, Figure 13 shows the performance impact of increasing the Linux SATA packet size
from 128 KB to 1024 KB. Figure 13(a) shows the results of
these experiments for WordCount and TeraSort benchmarks
with TPD ratio of 12. Figure 13(b) shows the improvement
in execution time for varying TPD configurations.