Cash: Distributed Cooperative Buffer Caching

Modern servers pay a heavy price in block access time on diskbound workloads when the working set is greater than the size of the local buffer cache. We provide a mechanism for cooperating servers to coordinate and share their local buffer caches. The coordinated buffer cache can handle working sets on the order of the aggregate cache memory, greatly improving performance on diskbound workloads. This facility is provided with minimal communication overhead, no penalty for local cache hits, and without any explicit kernel support