Flash Boost: Design of Flash Memory Buffer Cache Mechanism for Video-on-Demand

摘要

A magnetic disk is a serious bottleneck which limits the scalability of a video server due to its head seek overhead. For a video server, Interval Caching is a state-of-the-art caching mechanism that addresses the problem utilizing RAM as a buffer cache to serve more video streams. Flash memory SSD (Solid State Drive) is a brand new storage device which has very different traits from old storage devices like RAM or disks. The objective of this research is to investigate the applicability and potential impact that flash memory SSD has for a video server. Moreover, I will propose a novel buffer cache mechanism which exploits characteristics of flash memory SSD at maximum to improve the scalability of a video server.