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Computational complexity of an optical disk interface

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Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 1984)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 172))

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Abstract

The notion of an I/O interface for optical digital (write-once) disks is introduced that is quite different from earlier research in this area. The purpose of an I/O interface is to allow existing operating systems and application programs that use magnetic disks to use optical disks instead, with minimum difficulty. The interface is especially geared to applications that are not update-intensive or that require access to previous versions of records. We define what it means for an I/O interface to be disk-efficient. We demonstrate a disk-efficient interface and show that its I/O performance in many cases is optimum, up to a constant factor, among all disk-efficient interfaces. The basis of the interface is a data structure we call offset trees, which stores information about intervals with dynamically changing coordinates. Since this complexity model is based on practical concerns, these theoretical results translate nicely into an efficient implementation.

Some of this research was done while the author was consulting for the IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center. Support was also provided in part by NSF Grant MCS-81-05324, by an IBM research contract, and by ONR and DARPA under Contract N00014-83-K-0146 and ARPA Order No. 4786.

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Jan Paredaens

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© 1984 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Vitter, J.S. (1984). Computational complexity of an optical disk interface. In: Paredaens, J. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1984. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 172. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-13345-3_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-13345-3_46

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-13345-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-38886-9

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