Using speculative execution to automatically hide i/o latency

The gap between processing speeds and disk access times is widening. This trend is causingapplications that must fetch data from disk to spend an increasing proportion of theirexecution times stalled on disk I/O. I/O prefetching, a well-known technique for hidingdisk latency, has the potential to alleviate this problem, particularly when the data thatneeds to be fetched is distributed across multiple disks. A major hurdle to benefiting fromthis technique in practice is the difficulty of...