R&D: When Caching Systems Meet Emerging Storage Devices Case Study

ACM Digital Library has published, in HotStorage ’23: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems, an article written by Zhen Lin, Computer Science, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA, Lianjie Cao, Faraz Ahmed, Network and Distributed Systems Lab, Hewlett Packard Labs, Milpitas, CA, USA, Hui Lu, Computer Science, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA, and Puneet Sharma, Network and Distributed Systems Lab, Hewlett Packard Labs, Milpitas, California, USA.

Abstract: “Block-layer caching systems improve the I/O performance by using hybrid storage devices; the advent of fast, byte-addressable storage enables caching systems to further leverage new storage tiers (e.g., with persistent memory as the cache device and SSD as the backend device) to achieve better caching performance. However, the new storage devices also challenge the design and implementation of existing block-based caching systems. This paper conducts a comprehensive performance study of a popular caching system, Open CAS, and identifies new, unrevealed software bottlenecks. Our observations and root cause analysis cast light on optimizing the software stack of caching systems to incorporate emerging storage technologies.“