Data management for SSDs for large-scale interactive graphics applications

Solid state drives (SSDs) are emerging as an alternative storage medium to HDDs. SSDs have performance characteristics (e.g., fast random reads) that are very different from those of HDDs. Because of the high performance of SSDs, there are increasingly more research efforts to redesign the established techniques that are optimized for HDDs, to work well with SSDs. In this paper we focus on computing cache-coherent layouts of large-scale models for SSDs. It has been demonstrated that cache-oblivious layouts perform well for various applications running on HDDs. However, computing cache-oblivious layouts for large-models is known to be very expensive. Also these layouts cannot be maintained efficiently for dynamically changing models. Utilizing the properties of SSDs we propose an efficient layout computation method that produces a page-based cache-aware layout for SSDs. We show that the performance of our layout can be maintained under dynamic changes on the model and is similar to the cache-oblivious layout optimized for static models. We demonstrate the benefits of our method for large-scale walkthrough scene editing and rendering, and collision detection.