Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments

View/ Open
Date
1998-10-15Author
Acharya, Swarup
Alon, Rafael
Franklin, Michael J.
Zdonik, Stanley
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper proposes the use of repetitive broadcast as a way of
augmenting the memory hierarchy of clients in an asymmetric communication
environment. We describe a new technique called "Broadcast Disks" for
structuring the broadcast in a way that provides improved performance for
non-uniformly accessed data. The Broadcast Disk superimposes multiple
disks spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel in
effect creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. In addition
to proposing and defining the mechanism, a main result of this work is
that exploiting the potential of the broadcast structure requires a
reevaluation of basic cache management policies. We examine several
"pure" cache management policies and develop and measure implementable
approximations to these policies. These results and others are presented
in a set of simulation studies that substantiates the basic idea and
develops some of the intuitions required to design a particular broadcast
program.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-120)