MCS-B: An Energy Efficient Storage System for Astronomical Observation Data Based on Logical Block Replacement Strategy

Power conservation for the storage system is crucial for cost saving and there are many approaches to address it, such as multi-level storage and data migration strategy. However, most of them are purely theoretical studies without real experiments. In realistic application scenarios, there can be a variety of factors that can impact the effectiveness of the energy efficient model. In this paper, a new energy efficient storage system for astronomical observation data called MCS-B is designed, which uses multi-level caching strategy and block replacement strategy. According to the manner of astronomical data access, MCS-B uses LB (logical blocks) to cluster correlated files and places them on the data disk via a temporal and spatial pattern. We further design a specialized prefetching and caching strategy to create larger disk idle time intervals so that the disks that are not in use within a certain time will be powered down. Experimental results show that MCS-B outperforms existing traditional energy efficient schemes in the energy consumption by 34.24% up to 42.39%. Moreover, the average response time for requests is reduced by 71.36% up to 77.14%.