Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments

  • Authors:

  • Swarup Acharya;Rafael Alonso;Michael Franklin;Stanley Zdonik

  • Affiliations:

  • Brown University;MITL;University of Maryland;Brown University

  • Venue:
  • SIGMOD '95 Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

This paper proposes the use of repetitive broadcast as a way of augmenting the memory hierarchy of clients in an asymmetric communication environment. We describe a new technique called "Broadcast Disks" for structuring the broadcast in a way that provides improved performance for non-uniformly accessed data. The Broadcast Disk superimposes multiple disks spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel--in effect creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. In addition to proposing and defining the mechanism, a main result of this work is that exploiting the potential of the broadcast structure requires a re-evaluation of basic cache management policies. We examine several "pure" cache management policies and develop and measure implementable approximations to these policies. These results and others are presented in a set of simulation studies that substantiates the basic idea and develops some of the intuitions required to design a particular broadcast program.