[What is it?] [Where do I get it?] [To Do...] [Related Work]
What is it?
hy·a·line - adj. Resembling glass, as in translucence or transparency; glassy.
Hyaline Drive is a 3D disk display utility for visualizing hard disk data transfers. Using a special custom hack to DiskSim,
It can extract the parameters of each read and write event that occurs in a simulation run and display them on a 3D virtual disk.
Sectors which have been accessed by read or write calls are colored based on their recency in time, allowing the ability to see
disk usage petterns at a glance.
Where do I get it?
The current version of Hyaline Drive is 0.1.1-Apr 6 2004.
Source code is the property fo Randall Burns of JHU.
A zip file of executable and example files can be downloaded here. [ README ]
Executable requires the file cygwin1.dll, downloadable here.
To Do...
More sophisticated hacking of disksim would provide more info to the visual simulation:
- Disk zone information
- completion time of requests
- indication of read vs. write of request
- accurate representation of disk head location in simulation time
Also:
- A more windows command-prompt friendly way of launching(cygwin1.dll not found)
- A windows explorer-friendly method, loading args from within program or using config file
- A stand-alone parser, extracting disk info from disksim model files and presenting it in readable format
- Prettier display of "hot" sectors, instead of just points
Related Work
The DiskSim Simulation Environment (Version 3.0)
Revision Authors: John Bucy, Greg Ganger
Contributors: John Griffin, Jiri Schindler, Steve Schlosser
Original Authors: Greg Ganger, Bruce Worthington and Yale Patt