Prefetching is a method of overlapping the I/O of a job with that job’s own computation. The idea is simple. After a read operation completes and the job is about to start operating on the data, the input device is instructed to begin the next read immediately. The CPU and input device are then both busy. With luck, by the time the job is ready for the next data item, the input device will have finished reading that data item. The CPU can then begin processing the newly read data, while the input device starts to read the following data. A similar idea can be used for output. In this case, the job creates data that are put into a buffer until an output device can accept them. Compare the Prefetching scheme with the spooling scheme, where the CPU overlaps the input of one job with the computation and output of other jobs.