Autonomous L3 Cache Technolgy for High Responsiveness

Abstract

Web services and cloud computing paradigms have opened up many new vistas. The data intensive cloud applications usually require huge amounts of data to input and output from secondary storage systems. The outstanding progress in area of network communications has enabled high speed networks and therefore, communication latency bottleneck in cloud and other web applications has been shifted to node/storage level. Moreover, existing cloud solutions focused mainly on the efficient utilization of computing resources through virtualization and issues of storage bottleneck did not receive much attention. Moreover, virtualization based implementation ensures equal priority to all hosted applications, thus, real time applications in cloud environment can't meet their requirements. To meet the demand of overall low latency in cloud and other web services; and particularly to reduce I/O bottleneck at storage level, novel idea of autonomous L3 cache technology is proposed. Autonomous L3 cache technology utilizes local memory space as dedicated block device cache for certain specific application, thus prioritizing it over rest of hosted ones. Evaluation shows performance improvement of 5-8 times in terms of timeliness in given setup.