Cost-Aware Client-Side File Caching for Data-Intensive Applications

Parallel and distributed file systems are widely used to provide high throughput in high-performance computing and Cloud computing systems. To increase the parallelism, I/O requests are partitioned into multiple sub-requests (or `flows') and distributed across different data nodes. The performance of file systems is extremely poor if data nodes have highly unbalanced response time. Client-side caching offers a promising direction for addressing this issue. However, current work has primarily used client-side memory as a read cache and employed a write-through policy which requires synchronous update for every write and significantly under-utilizes the client-side cache when the applications are write-intensive. Realizing that the cost of an I/O request depends on the struggler sub-requests, we propose a cost-aware client-side file caching (CCFC) strategy, that is designed to cache the sub-requests with high I/O cost on the client end. This caching policy enables a new trade-off across write performance, consistency guarantee and cache size dimensions. Using benchmark workloads MADbench2, we evaluate our new cache policy alongside conventional write-through. We find that the proposed CCFC strategy can achieve up to 110% throughput improvement compared to the conventional write-through policies with the same cache size on an 85-node cluster.