Data Cache Research Articles

Cooperative Distributed Uplink Cache over B5G small cell networks.

The emergence of content-centric network has resulted in a substantial increase in data transmission in both uplink and downlink directions. To tackle the ensuing challenges of network congestion and bottlenecks in backhaul links within Beyond Fifth Generation (B5G) networks, data caching has emerged as a popular solution. However, caching for uplink transmission in a distributed B5G scenario poses several challenges, including duplicate content matching and users' obliviousness about cached contents. Furthermore, it is important to maximize available space by caching the most popular contents in a distributed manner. In this paper, we propose two schemes for uplink transmission in distributed B5G SCNs. The first scheme focuses on content matching to eliminate duplicate contents among distributed caches, while the second scheme redistributes un-duplicated cached contents among distributed caches based on their available space and content's size. These approaches aim to enhance energy and spectral efficiency by reducing unnecessary uploads and optimizing distributed content caching, in addition to improve the content delivery. The analysis shows that the proposed schemes outperform the existing schemes by improving the cache hit ratio, cache hit probability, overall distributed cache efficiency, and diversity by 29.17%, 74.89%, 24.17%, and, 80%, respectively. Furthermore, the average throughput, Spectrum Efficiency (SE), and Energy Efficiency (EE) of the access network is improved by 17.78%, 18%, and 78%, respectively. Besides that, the EE and SE of both the sidehaul and backhaul links of the SBSs are also improved.

A Contract-aware and Cost-effective LSM Store for Cloud Storage with Low Latency Spikes

Cloud storage is gaining popularity because features such as pay-as-you-go significantly reduce storage costs. However, the community has not sufficiently explored its contract model and latency characteristics. As LSM-Tree-based key-value stores (LSM stores) become the building block for numerous cloud applications, how cloud storage would impact the performance of key-value accesses is vital. This study reveals the significant latency variances of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) under various I/O pressures, which challenges LSM store read performance on cloud storage. To reduce the corresponding tail latency, we propose Calcspar, a contract-aware LSM store for cloud storage, which efficiently addresses the challenges by regulating the rate of I/O requests to cloud storage and absorbing surplus I/O requests with the data cache. We specifically developed a fluctuation-aware cache to lower the high latency brought on by workload fluctuations. Additionally, we build a congestion-aware IOPS allocator to reduce the impact of LSM store internal operations on read latency. We evaluated Calcspar on EBS with different real-world workloads and compared it to the cutting-edge LSM stores. The results show that Calcspar can significantly reduce tail latency while maintaining regular read and write performance, keeping the 99 th percentile latency under 550μs and reducing average latency by 66%. In addition, Calcspar has lower write prices and average latency compared to Cloud NoSQL services offered by cloud vendors.

Blockchain Based Decentralized and Proactive Caching Strategy in Mobile Edge Computing Environment.

In the mobile edge computing (MEC) environment, the edge caching can provide the timely data response service for the intelligent scenarios. However, due to the limited storage capacity of edge nodes and the malicious node behavior, the question of how to select the cached contents and realize the decentralized security data caching faces challenges. In this paper, a blockchain-based decentralized and proactive caching strategy is proposed in an MEC environment to address this problem. The novelty is that the blockchain was adopted in an MEC environment with a proactive caching strategy based on node utility, and the corresponding optimization problem was built. The blockchain was adopted to build a secure and reliable service environment. The employed methodology is that the optimal caching strategy was achieved based on the linear relaxation technology and the interior point method. Additionally, in a content caching system, there is a trade-off between cache space and node utility, and the caching strategy was proposed to solve this problem. There was also a trade-off between the consensus process delay of blockchain and the caching latency of content. An offline consensus authentication method was adopted to reduce the influence of the consensus process delay on the content caching. The key finding was that the proposed algorithm can reduce latency and can ensure the security data caching in an IoT environment. Finally, the simulation experiment showed that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 49.32%, 43.11%, and 34.85% improvements on the cache hit rate, the average content response latency, and the average system utility, respectively, compared to the random content caching algorithm, and it achieved up to 9.67%, 8.11%, and 5.95% increases, successively, compared to the greedy content caching algorithm.

Application-Level Caching Approach Based on Enhanced Aging Factor and Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) have long served as the fundamental infrastructure for web applications. Relatively slow access speeds characterize an RDBMS because its data is stored on a disk. This RDBMS weakness can be overcome using an in-memory database (IMDB). Each query result can be stored in the IMDB to accelerate future access. However, due to the limited capacity of the server cache in the IMDB, an appropriate data priority assessment mechanism needs to be developed. This paper presents a similar cache framework that considers four data vectors, namely the data size, timestamp, aging factor, and controller access statistics for each web page, which serve as the foundation elements for determining the replacement policy whenever there is a change in the content of the server cache. The proposed similarCache employs the Pearson correlation coefficient to quantify the similarity levels among the cached data in the server cache. The lowest Pearson correlation coefficients cached data are the first to be evicted from the memory. The proposed similarCache was empirically evaluated based on simulations conducted on four IRcache datasets. The simulation outcomes revealed that the data access patterns, and the configuration of the allocated memory cache significantly influenced the hit ratio performance. In particular, the simulations on the SV dataset with the most minor memory space configuration exhibited a 2.33% and 1% superiority over the SIZE and FIFO algorithms, respectively. Future tasks include building a cache that can adapt to data access patterns by determining the standard deviation. The proposed similarCache should raise the Pearson coefficient for often available data to the same level as most accessed data in exceptional cases.

POEM: Performance Optimization and Endurance Management for Non-volatile Caches

Non-volatile memories (NVMs) with their high storage density and ultra-low leakage power offer promising potential for redesigning the memory hierarchy in next-generation Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). However, the adoption of NVMs in cache designs introduces challenges such as NVM write overheads and limited NVM endurance. The shared NVM cache in an MPSoC experiences requests from different processor cores and responses from the off-chip memory when the requested data is not present in the cache. Besides, upon evictions of dirty data from higher-level caches, the shared NVM cache experiences another source of write operations, known as writebacks . These sources of write operations: writebacks and responses, further exacerbate the contention for the shared bandwidth of the NVM cache, and create significant performance bottlenecks. Uncontrolled write operations can also affect the endurance of the NVM cache, posing a threat to cache lifetime and system reliability. Existing strategies often address either performance or cache endurance individually, leaving a gap for a holistic solution. This study introduces the Performance Optimization and Endurance Management (POEM) methodology, a novel approach that aggressively bypasses cache writebacks and responses to alleviate the NVM cache contention. Contrary to the existing bypass policies which do not pay adequate attention to the shared NVM cache contention, and focus too much on cache data reuse, POEM’s aggressive bypass significantly improves the overall system performance, even at the expense of data reuse. POEM also employs effective wear leveling to enhance the NVM cache endurance by careful redistribution of write operations across different cache lines. Across diverse workloads, POEM yields an average speedup of \(34\% \) over a naïve baseline and \(28.8\% \) over a state-of-the-art NVM cache bypass technique, while enhancing the cache endurance by \(15\% \) over the baseline. POEM also explores diverse design choices by exploiting a key policy parameter that assigns varying priorities to the two system-level objectives.

Simple modulation of Lissajous MEMS laser beam scanning with reconfigurable structured light patterns for 3D imaging

Structured light 3D imaging systems commonly employ panel-based projectors or 1-axis MEMS mirrors with beam expander lens to project multi-frame barcodes or dot clouds, addressing challenges posed by objects with multi-scale feature sizes. However, these methods often result in large system volumes due to the required projection multi-lens modules, high hardware costs, or limited light pattern generation capabilities that hindering measurement precision enhancement. This paper introduces an innovative approach to reconfigurable spatial light pattern projection using a single bi-axial MEMS mirror with Lissajous scanning. In contrast to the pixel-by-pixel pre-defined image patterns encoding of conventional 2D laser beam scanning, the proposed method simply aligns the MEMS bi-axial resonance frequencies with laser pulse modulation, enabling the projection of diverse structured light patterns such as stripes, lines, dot matrices, and random dot clouds, which can adapt to different 3D imaging algorithms demands. It eliminates the need for multi-frame encoding and streamlines data caching, simplifies digital logic hardware. A prototype 3D imaging system was developed to demonstrate the mathematical model for laser modulation and the technical feasibility based on the proposed principle. Beyond its lens-free essence, the system supports focal-free optics and a compact projection form factor, which accommodates to a broad range of projection distances and field-of-views based on object’s location. 3D depth map of polynomial surface and blocks objects are extracted through single-frame pattern projection with a relative high accuracy. The presented modulation theory for diverse structured light pattern generation opens avenues for versatile and compact 3D imaging applications of LiDAR and robotic 3D vision.

Cross-Core Data Sharing for Energy-Efficient GPUs

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are the accelerator of choice in a variety of application domains because they can accelerate massively parallel workloads and can be easily programmed using general-purpose programming frameworks such as CUDA and OpenCL. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) contains an L1 data cache (L1D) to exploit the locality in data accesses. L1D misses are costly for GPUs due to two reasons. First, L1D misses consume a lot of energy as they need to access the L2 cache (L2) via an on-chip network and the off-chip DRAM in case of L2 misses. Second, L1D misses impose performance overhead if the GPU does not have enough active warps to hide the long memory access latency. We observe that threads running on different SMs share 55% of the data they read from the memory. Unfortunately, as the L1Ds are in the non-coherent memory domain, each SM independently fetches data from the L2 or the off-chip memory into its L1D, even though the data may be currently available in the L1D of another SM. Our goal is to service L1D read misses via other SMs, as much as possible, to cut down costly accesses to the L2 or the off-chip DRAM. To this end, we propose a new data sharing mechanism, called Cross-Core Data Sharing (CCDS) . CCDS employs a predictor to estimate whether or not the required cache block exists in another SM. If the block is predicted to exist in another SM’s L1D, CCDS fetches the data from the L1D that contains the block. Our experiments on a suite of 26 workloads show that CCDS improves average energy and performance by 1.30 × and 1.20 ×, respectively, compared to the baseline GPU. Compared to the state-of-the-art data-sharing mechanism, CCDS improves average energy and performance by 1.37 × and 1.11 ×, respectively.

Optimization of Clustering and Trajectory for Minimizing Age of Information in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing Network.

With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, massive amounts of sensor data in applications such as fire monitoring need to be transmitted to edge servers for timely processing. However, there is an energy-hole phenomenon in transmitting data only through terrestrial multi-hop networks. In this study, we focus on the data collection task in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) network, where a UAV is deployed as the mobile data collector for the ground sensor nodes (SNs) to ensure high information freshness. Meanwhile, the UAV is equipped with an edge server for data caching. We first establish a rigorous mathematical model in which the age of information (AoI) is used as a measure of information freshness, related to both the data collection time and the UAV's flight time. Then a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem is formulated to minimize the peak AoI of the collected data. To solve the problem efficiently, we propose an iterative two-step algorithm named the AoI-minimized association and trajectory planning (AoI-MATP) algorithm. In each iteration, the optimal SN-collection point (CP) associations and CP locations for the parameter ε are first obtained by the affinity propagation clustering algorithm. The optimal UAV trajectory is found using an improved elite genetic algorithm. Simulation results show that based on the optimized ε, the AoI-MATP algorithm can achieve a balance between data collection time and flight time, reducing the peak AoI of the collected data.

DAG-aware harmonizing job scheduling and data caching for disaggregated analytics frameworks

Modern data analytics frameworks often integrate with external storage services, which can lead to storage bottlenecks. Existing caching and prefetching solutions utilize high-level information from data analytics frameworks to forecast future data accesses. They employ these predictions to prefetch data into the cache and manage the cache contents. However, this approach overlooks a fundamental opportunity: rather than caching data given a prediction of job execution, influencing the job execution order can enable more effective caching and prefetching. With this key insight, we introduce a novel system called Tripod, designed to synchronize job scheduling and data caching for analytics frameworks.Leveraging the higher-level information provided by analytics frameworks, Tripod explores the best-suited job execution order, guided by developed heuristics, to facilitate prefetching and caching. To fully exploit the potential of Tripod, we also introduce a novel caching strategy named CAP. This strategy not only acknowledges the job scheduling order but also offers fine-grained control over object prefetching and eviction. Our evaluation, conducted using standard analytic benchmarks (TPC-H and TPC-DS), demonstrates that Tripod achieves a speedup of up to 1.7x on state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, when employing CAP to make caching decisions, the performance can further be improved (as much as 1.5x).

Impact of Segmentation and Popularity-based Cache Replacement Policies on Named Data Networking

The data distribution mechanism of internet protocol (IP) technology is inefficient because it necessitates the user to await a response from the server. Named data networking (NDN) is a cutting-edge technology being assessed for enhancing IP networks, primarily because it incorporates a data packet caching technique on every router. However, the effectiveness of this approach is highly dependent on the router's content capacity, thus requiring the use data replacement mechanism when the router capacity is full. The least recently used (LRU) method is employed for cache replacement policy; yet, it is considered ineffective as it neglects the content's popularity. The LRU algorithm replaces the infrequently requested data, leading to inefficient caching of popular data when multiple users constantly request it. To address this problem, we propose a segmented LRU (SLRU) replacement strategy that considers content popularity. The SLRU will evaluate both popular content and content that has previously been popular in two segment categories, namely the probationary and protected segments. Icarus simulator was used to evaluate multiple comprehensive scenarios. Our experimental results show that the SLRU obtains a better cache hit ratio (CHR) and able to minimize latency and link load compared to existing cache replacement policies such as First In, First Out (FIFO), LRU, and Climb.

Improving web-oriented information systems efficiency using Redis caching mechanisms

The responsiveness of a web application with minimum latency time and maximum web pages loading speed is determined by its overall performance. When dealing with a large number of users and amount of data, the performance of web applications is significantly affected by ways of data processing, storage and access. This paper identifies the significance of data caching process to speed up access to relational database. The study examines approaches to improve the performance of web applications through the joint use of MySQL relational database management system (DBMS) and Redis NoSQL DBMS. The practical part of the study presents a description of a web application built based on Java and Spring Boot framework. The paper proposes the implementation of the caching strategies that take into account the principles of aspect-oriented programming. Made experiments on performance testing of the developed web application with and without caching are presented. The presented results of the study allowed us to conclude that it is possible to improve the performance of web applications by the optimal use of caching strategies when performing database queries.

Inference of highly time-resolved melt pool visual characteristics and spatially-dependent lack-of-fusion defects in laser powder bed fusion using acoustic and thermal emission data

With a growing demand for high-quality fabrication, the interest in real-time process and defect monitoring of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) has increased, leading manufacturers to incorporate a variety of online sensing methods including acoustic sensing, photodiode sensing, and high-speed imaging. However, real-time acquisition of high-resolution melt pool images in particular remains computationally demanding in practice due to the high variability of melt pool morphologies and the limitation of data caching and transfer, making it challenging to detect the local lack-of-fusion (LOF) defect occurrences. In this work, we propose a new acoustic and thermal information-based monitoring method that can robustly infer critical LPBF melt pool morphological features in image forms and detect spatially-dependent LOF defects within a short time period. We utilize wavelet scalogram matrices of acoustic and photodiode clip data to identify and predict highly time-resolved (within a 1.0 ms window) visual melt pool characteristics via a well-trained data-driven pipeline. With merely the acoustic and photodiode-collected thermal emission data as the input, the proposed pipeline enables data-driven inference and tracking of highly variable melt pool visual characteristics with R2≥0.8. We subsequently validate our proposed approach to infer local LOF defects between two adjacent scanlines, showing that our proposed approach can outperform our selected baseline theoretical model based on previous literature. Revealing the physical correlation between airborne acoustic emission, thermal emission, and melt pool morphology, our work demonstrates the feasibility of creating an efficient and cost-effective acoustic- and thermal-based approach to facilitate online visual melt pool characterization and LOF defect detection. We believe that our work can further contribute to the advances in quality control for LPBF.

Data Placement Using a Classifier for SLC/QLC Hybrid SSDs

In hybrid SSDs (solid-state drives) consisting of SLC (single-level cell) and QLC (quad-level cell), efficiently using the limited SLC cache space is crucial. In this paper, we present a practical data placement scheme, which determines the placement location of incoming write requests using a lightweight machine-learning model. It leverages information about I/O workload characteristics and SSD status to identify cold data that does not need to be stored in the SLC cache with high accuracy. By strategically bypassing the SLC cache for cold data, our scheme significantly reduces unnecessary data movements between the SLC and QLC regions, improving the overall efficiency of the SSD. Through simulation-based studies using real-world workloads, we demonstrate that our scheme outperforms existing approaches by up to 44%.

Transient Data Caching Based on Maximum Entropy Actor–Critic in Internet-of-Things Networks

AbstractWith the rapid development of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), a massive amount of transient data is transmitted in edge networks. Transient data are highly time-sensitive, such as monitoring data generated by industrial devices. Due to their inefficiency, traditional caching strategies in edge networks are inadequate for handling transient data. Thus, to improve the efficiency of transient data caching, we construct a freshness model of transient data and propose a maximum entropy Actor–Critic-based caching strategy, TD-MEAC-which can improve the freshness of cached data and reduce the long-term caching cost. Simulation results show that the proposed TD-MEAC achieves a higher cache hit rate and maintains a higher average freshness of cached transient data compared with the existing DRL and baseline caching strategies.

Leveraging the page buffer data cache for enhanced programmability in NAND flash memories with on‐chip microcontrollers

AbstractThis paper proposes a simple yet effective scheme for NAND Flash memories that employ on‐chip microcontroller units (MCUs) to manage internal array operations. Through minimal hardware overhead, the proposed scheme enables—without mask revision— executing new or updated array operations by leveraging the page buffer data cache instead of the hard‐wired on‐chip read‐only memory (ROM) for MCU instruction memory. While not applicable to ordinary user operations, this approach presents significant advantages across various stages of NAND flash memory development and implementation.

TinyML Algorithms for Big Data Management in Large-Scale IoT Systems

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) and Big Data, enhanced by Edge Artificial Intelligence, are essential for effectively managing the extensive data produced by numerous connected devices. Our study introduces a set of TinyML algorithms designed and developed to improve Big Data management in large-scale IoT systems. These algorithms, named TinyCleanEDF, EdgeClusterML, CompressEdgeML, CacheEdgeML, and TinyHybridSenseQ, operate together to enhance data processing, storage, and quality control in IoT networks, utilizing the capabilities of Edge AI. In particular, TinyCleanEDF applies federated learning for Edge-based data cleaning and anomaly detection. EdgeClusterML combines reinforcement learning with self-organizing maps for effective data clustering. CompressEdgeML uses neural networks for adaptive data compression. CacheEdgeML employs predictive analytics for smart data caching, and TinyHybridSenseQ concentrates on data quality evaluation and hybrid storage strategies. Our experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques includes executing all the algorithms in various numbers of Raspberry Pi devices ranging from one to ten. The experimental results are promising as we outperform similar methods across various evaluation metrics. Ultimately, we anticipate that the proposed algorithms offer a comprehensive and efficient approach to managing the complexities of IoT, Big Data, and Edge AI.

QoE-aware budgeted edge data caching online: A primal–dual approach

Data caching has garnered significant attention in the field of edge computing due to the low-latency services offered by nearby edge servers. To efficiently utilize the data cache budget and ensure minimal data transmission latency, selecting appropriate edge servers for data caching is crucial. While the users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) plays a vital role in the service providers’ benefits, it has not been adequately considered in dynamic edge computing environments. This is primarily due to the non-linear correlation between QoE and Quality-of-Service (QoS), making cost-effective edge data caching challenging within the service provider’s limited budget. In this paper, we formally define the QoE-aware budgeted online edge data caching (QoE-BOEDC) problem, aiming to maximize the average user QoE while adhering to the service provider’s budget in a dynamic edge computing environment. Here, we formulate a formal optimization model for QoE-BOEDC, which can be proven to be NP-complete. Subsequently, we propose an online algorithm, PDOQ (Primal–Dual Optimization for QoE), based on the primal–dual technique, and theoretically establish its comparative ratio. Additionally, we conduct both small-scale and large-scale experimental tests, and the experimental results demonstrate that PDOQ significantly outperforms other representative algorithms.

Hybrid fault tolerance in distributed in-memory storage systems

An in-memory storage system provides submillisecond latency and improves the concurrency of user applications by caching data into memory from external storage. Fault tolerance of in-memory storage systems is essential, as the loss of cached data requires access to data from external storage, which evidently increases the response latency. Typically, replication and erasure code (EC) are two fault-tolerant schemes that pose different trade-offs between access performance and storage usage. To help make the best performance and space trade-off, we design ElasticMem, a hybrid fault-tolerant distributed in-memory storage system that supports elastic redundancy transition to dynamically change the fault-tolerant scheme. ElasticMem exploits a novel EC-oriented replication (EOR) that carefully designs the data placement of replication according to the future data layout of EC to enhance the I/O efficiency of redundancy transition. ElasticMem solves the consistency problem caused by concurrent data accesses via a lightweight table-based scheme combined with data bypassing. It detects corelated read and write requests and serves subsequent read requests with local data. We implement a prototype that realizes ElasticMem based on Memcached. Experiments show that ElasticMem remarkably reduces the time of redundancy transition, the overall latency of corelated concurrent data accesses, and the latency of single data access among them.

Competitive Analysis of Online Elastic Caching of Transient Data in Multi-Tiered Content Delivery Network

Competitive Analysis of Online Elastic Caching of Transient Data in Multi-Tiered Content Delivery Network

CacheIEE: Cache-Assisted Isolated Execution Environment on ARM Multi-Core Platforms

ARM TrustZone technology has been widely used to create Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for enhancing the security of applications. However, the increasing number of installed security-sensitive applications in the secure world will inevitably enlarge the trusted computing base (TCB) of TEE systems. To minimize the TCB of the secure world and increase application portability, Isolated Execution Environments (IEEs) are proposed to protect applications in enclaves created in the normal world. However, existing IEE systems cannot provide the same level of security as the TEE systems, particularly, on resolving the multi-vector attacks that include both physical memory disclosure attacks and software attacks. In this paper, we develop a new cache-assisted IEE system called CacheIEE that creates enclaves in the L1 data cache of the normal world to protect sensitive data against multi-vector attacks. First, by always storing the sensitive data in the L1 data cache, CacheIEE can effectively prevent physical memory disclosure attacks. Second, we protect the L1 data cache against untrusted rich OS running in other cores. To support more applications, CacheIEE can process large-size sensitive data in the L1 data cache with constrained capacity. We implement a system prototype of CacheIEE and verify its security and practicability.