User-Level Communication based Cooperative Caching

摘要

Cooperative caching is an important element in many distributed systems. However, fewer researches have been focused on how to improve it based on user-level communication technologies that are used more and more widely. This paper presents a user-level communication based caching design, called uniform caching, to decrease the complexity of I/O modules. Uniform caching uses communication memory as the cache directly and employs RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) methods to access the remote cache, which can improve access-performance and eliminate data copies between the cache and the communication layer. Our analysis figures out this design can reduce remote-access time about 17.8% than the traditional cooperative caching averagely while the improvement is independent of the cooperative caching algorithm used. Moreover, the prototype of uniform caching on GM has been implemented and achieves a satisfying result.