@InProceedings{anderson:buttress,
  author = {Eric Anderson and Mahesh Kallahalla and Mustafa Uysal and Ram
  Swaminathan},
  title = {Buttress: A toolkit for flexible and high fidelity {I/O}
  benchmarking},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the USENIX FAST '04 Conference on File and
  Storage Technologies},
  year = {2004},
  month = {March},
  pages = {45--58},
  organization = {Hewlett-Packard Laboratories},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  address = {San Francisco, CA},
  URL = {http://www.usenix.org/events/fast04/tech/anderson.html},
  keywords = {benchmarking software, performance analysis, I/O access patterns,
  I/O workloads, pario-bib},
  abstract = {In benchmarking I/O systems, it is important to generate,
  accurately, the I/O access pattern that one is intending to generate.
  However, timing accuracy ( issuing I/Os at the desired time) at high I/O
  rates is difficult to achieve on stock operating systems. We currently lack
  tools to easily and accurately generate complex I/O workloads on modern
  storage systems. As a result, we may be introducing substantial errors in
  observed system metrics when we benchmark I/O systems using inaccurate tools
  for replaying traces or for producing synthetic workloads with known
  inter-arrival times. \par In this paper, we demonstrate the need for timing
  accuracy for I/O benchmarking in the context of replaying I/O traces. We also
  quantitatively characterize the impact of error in issuing I/Os on measured
  system parameters. For instance, we show that the error in perceived I/O
  response times can be as much as +350% or -15% by using naive benchmarking
  tools that have timing inaccuracies. To address this problem, we present
  Buttress, a portable and flexible toolkit that can generate I/O workloads
  with microsecond accuracy at the I/O throughputs of high-end enterprise
  storage arrays. In particular, Buttress can issue I/O requests within 100µs
  of the desired issue time even at rates of 10000 I/Os per second (IOPS).},
  comment = {Looks like a really cool piece of software. Generates I/O
  workloads by replaying I/O traces.}
}