Abstract

In a large-scale information system such as a digital library or the web, a set of distributed caches can improve their effectiveness by coordinating their data placement decisions. In this paper, we examine the design space for cooperative placement and replacement algorithms. Our main focus is on the placement algorithms, which attempt to solve the following problem: given a set of caches, the network distances between caches, and predictions of the access rates from each cache to a set of objects, determine where to place each object in order to minimize the average access cost. Replacement algorithms also attempt to minimize access cost, but they work by selecting which objects to evict when a cache miss occurs. Using simulation, we examine three practical cooperative placement algorithms including one that is provably close to optimal, and we compare these algorithms to the optimal placement algorithm and several cooperative and non-cooperative replacement algorithms. We draw fiv...

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