Collective caching: application-aware client-side file caching

Parallel file subsystems in today’s high-performance computers adopt many I/O optimization strategies that were designed for distributed systems. These strategies, for instance client-side file caching, treat each I/O request process independently, due to the consideration that clients are unlikely related with each other in a distributed environment. However, it is inadequate to apply such strategies directly in the high-performance computers where most of the I/O requests come from the processes that work on the same parallel applications. We believe that client-side caching could perform more effectively if the caching sub-system is aware of the process scope of an application and regards all the application processes as a single client. In this paper, we propose the idea of “collective caching” which coordinates the application processes to manage cache data and achieve cache coherence without involving the I/O servers. To demonstrate this idea, we implemented a collective...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Wei-keng Liao, Kenin Coloma, Alok N. Choudhary, Lee Ward, Eric Russell, Sonja Tideman
• Keywords: Caching Sub-system, Collective Caching, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 2005, I/O Requests