Real-time Integrated Prefetching and Caching

The high latencies for access to background memory like hard disks or flash memory can be reduced by caching or hidden by prefetching. We consider the problem of scheduling the resulting I/Os when the available fast cache memory is limited and when we have real-time constraints where for each requested data block we are given a time interval during which this block needs to be in main memory. We give a near linear time algorithm for this problem which produces a feasible schedule whenever one exists. Another algorithm additionally minimizes I/Os and still runs in polynomial-time. For the online variant of the problem, we give a competitive algorithm that uses lookahead and augmented disk speed. We show a tight relationship between the amount of lookahead and the speed required to get a competitive algorithm.