Caching and scheduling for broadcast disk systems.pdf

Caching and Scheduling for Broadcast Disk SystemsVincenzo Liberatore1Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 1UMIACS, A. V. Williams Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail:vliberatore@. URL: /users/liberato/. AbstractUnicast connections lead to performance and scalability problems when a large client population attemptsto access the same data. Broadcast push and broadcast disk technology address the problem by broadcastingdata items from a server to a large number of clients. Broadcast disk performance depends mainly on cachingstrategies at the client site and on how the broadcast is scheduled at the server site. An on-line broadcastdisk paging strategy makes caching decisions without knowing access probabilities. In this paper, we subjecton-line paging algorithms to extensive empirical investigation. The Gray algorithm [25] always outperformedother on-line strategies on both synthetic and Web traces. Moreover, caching limited the skewness neededfrom a broadcast schedule, and led to favor ecient caching algorithms over rened scheduling strategieswhen the cache was not small. Prior to this paper, no work had empirically investigated on-line pagingalgorithms and their relation with server scheduling. 1 IntroductionThe demand of network data services has been growing exponentially during the past few years. Moreand more often, increased workloads cannot be satised by current technology. In particular, when clientsrequested several million connections to a hot Web site during peak periods (e.g. Deep Blue chess match,Olympic games), servers were overmatched by the heavy workload. The problem was that point-to-point(unicast) connections satised each request individually, and server performance did not scale with thenumber of requests. In general, the point-to-point paradigm poses a scalability problem that is exacerbatedby the exponential and sustained growth of data service demand. In this scenario, broadcast push promises toaddress the issu