Cooperative Caching in Linux Clusters 1

Abstract. Most operating systems used in cluster systems manage memory locally without the benefits of cluster-wide cooperation. During typical use there will be some computers in a cluster that are short of memory while others have idle memory wasted. This significant deficiency raises a question: how to improve the cluster operating system to support the use of cluster-wide memory as a global distributed resource. In this paper, we propose a cooperative caching scheme, which not only allows the operating system to avoid many expensive disk accesses by using cluster-wide memory for file caching but also improves the overall throughput of cluster file systems by reading files directly from the cache of other sites. And we also describe corresponding changes in Linux kernel memory management to support this cooperative caching scheme