C-Aware: A Cache Management Algorithm Considering Cache Media Access Characteristic in Cloud Computing

Data congestion and network delay are the important factors that affect performance of cloud computing systems. Using local disk of computing nodes as a cache can sometimes get better performance than accessing data through the network. This paper presents a storage cache placement algorithm—C-Aware, which traces history access information of cache and data source, adaptively decides whether to cache data according to cache media characteristic and current access environment, and achieves good performance under different workload on storage server. We implement this algorithm in both simulated and real environments. Our simulation results using OLTP and WebSearch traces demonstrate that C-Aware achieves better adaptability to the changes of server workload. Our benchmark results in real system show that, in the scenario where the size of local cache is half of data set, C-Aware gets nearly 80% improvement compared with traditional methods when the server is not busy and still presents comparable performance when there is high workload on server side.