The Rubicon workload characterization tool

We describe the design, implementation and usage of Rubicon, a tool for the characterization of I/O workloads. Rubicon provides a rich set of operations on I/O traces, and was designed to be easily extended through the addition of new analysis functions and reporting methods. The design of Rubicon makes it simple to adapt to multiple types of workload characterization, and allows the user to focus solely on the analysis task at hand, rather than the ephemera of the analysis framework. We describe several applications of the Rubicon tool that demonstrate its flexibility and ease of use. We believe that the structure and functionality provided by a tool like Rubicon should be applicable and useful to the analysis of any kind of traces, and that building such a tool is more useful than the series of “one-off” standalone analysis programs generally constructed for this task.