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With the emergence of flash memory as a new viable storage medium, the new design concern of flash endurance arises, necessitating a revisit of workload characteristics, in particular, of the write behavior. Inspired by Web caching studies where a Zipf-like access pattern is commonly found, we hypothesize that write count distribution at the block level may also follow Zipf\u2019s Law. To validate this hypothesis, we study 48 block I\/O traces collected from a wide variety of real and benchmark applications. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that the Zipf-like pattern indeed widely exists in write traffic provided its disguises are removed by statistical processing. This finding implies that write skew in a large class of applications could be analytically expressed and, thus, facilitates design tradeoff explorations adaptive to workload characteristics.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/2908557","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2016,6,10]],"date-time":"2016-06-10T12:46:01Z","timestamp":1465562761000},"page":"1-19","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":48,"title":["Write Skew and Zipf Distribution"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"12","author":[{"given":"Yue","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada"}]},{"given":"Jianwen","family":"Zhu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2016,6,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference on Annual Technical Conference (ATC\u201908)","author":"Agrawal Nitin","year":"2008","unstructured":"Nitin Agrawal , Vijayan Prabhakaran , Ted Wobber , John D. 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