The Cyclone Server Architecture: Streamlining Delivery of Popular Content
Date
2000-12-15
DOI
Authors
Rost, Stanislav
Byers, John
Bestavros, Azer
Version
OA Version
Citation
Rost, Stan; Byers, John; Bestavros, Azer. "The Cyclone Server Architecture: Streamlining Delivery of Popular Content", Technical Report BUCS-2000-025, Computer Science Department, Boston University, December 15, 2000. [Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1818]
Abstract
We propose a new technique for efficiently delivering popular content from information repositories with bounded file caches. Our strategy relies on the use of fast erasure codes (a.k.a. forward error correcting codes) to generate encodings of popular files, of which only a small sliding window is cached at any time instant, even to satisfy an unbounded number of asynchronous requests for the file. Our approach capitalizes on concurrency to maximize sharing of state across different request threads while minimizing cache memory utilization. Additional reduction in resource requirements arises from providing for a lightweight version of the network stack.
In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of our Cyclone server as a Linux kernel subsystem.