Parity-Only Caching for Robust Straggler Tolerance

Abstract

Stragglers (i.e., nodes with slow performance) are prevalent and incur performance instability in large-scale storage systems, yet it is challenging to detect stragglers in practice. We make a case by showing how erasure-coded caching provides robust straggler tolerance without relying on timely and accurate straggler detection, while incurring limited redundancy overhead in caching. We first analytically motivate that caching only parity blocks can achieve effective straggler tolerance. To this end, we present POCache, a parity-only caching design that provides robust straggler tolerance. To limit the erasure coding overhead, POCache slices blocks into smaller subblocks and parallelizes the coding operations at the subblock level. Also, it leverages a straggler-aware cache algorithm that takes into account both file access popularity and straggler estimation to decide which parity blocks should be cached. We implement a POCache prototype atop Hadoop 3.1 HDFS, while preserving the performance and functionalities of normal HDFS operations. Our extensive experiments on both local and Amazon EC2 clusters show that in the presence of stragglers, POCache can reduce the read latency by up to 87.9% compared to vanilla HDFS.