Section: New Results

System support: End-to-end caching

Participants : Sara Bouchenak, Dàmian Serrano.

Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a virtually infinite set of configurable computing resources. This model aims to provide hardware and software services to customers, while minimizing human efforts in terms of service installation, configuration and maintenance, for both cloud provider and cloud customer. A cloud may have the form of an Infrastructure as a Service (SaaS), a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or a Software as a Service (SaaS). Clouds pose significant challenges to the full elasticity of clouds, their scalibility and their dependability in large scale data management and large scale computing resources. Caching is a means for high performance and scalability of distributed systems. Although caching solutions have been successfully studied for individual systems such as database systems or web servers, if collectively applied, these solutions violate the coherence of cached data. We precisely studied this issue in e-Caching, a novel end-to-end caching system.

The contribution of this work is twofold: guaranteeing the coherence of cached data at multiple locations of a distributed system, while improving the overall performance of the system. In collaboration with Marta Patino and Ricardo Jimenez from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, we proposed a novel distributed caching protocol, implemented it and evaluated it with real online services. The experiments showed that e-Caching was successfully able to improve service performance by two orders of magnitude.

This work has been presented at CFSE, the French Chapter of ACM-SIGOPS in May 2011. An extended version has been submitted for publication in a journal.