Building adaptable cache services

Caching is crucial to improve performances in many computing systems. It is context dependent, thus many types of cache exist. As a consequence, when a cache is required, it is usually built from scratch. Such a solution is time (and money) consuming, in particular in data grid context where several caches may be required. This paper proposes ACS (Adaptable Cache Service), a framework which allows building adaptable cache services. It presents a generic cache definition and provides a description of models implemented in the framework. ACS aims at facilitating the development of cache services for any application. Our current experiences concern their use in building a data grid middleware (Gedeon project).