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In-memory key-value cache systems, such as Memcached and Redis, are essential in today's data centers. A key mission of such cache systems is to identify the most valuable data for caching. To achieve this, the current system design keeps track of each key-value item's access and attempts to make accurate estimation on its temporal locality. All it aims is to achieve the highest cache hit ratio. However, as cache capacity quickly increases, the overhead of managing metadata for a massive amount of small key-value items rises to an unbearable level. Put it simply, the current fine-grained, heavy-cost approach cannot continue to scale. In this paper, we have performed an experimental study on the scalability challenge of the current key-value cache system design and quantitatively analyzed the inherent issues related to the metadata operations for cache management. We further propose a key-value cache management scheme, calledCatalyst, based on a highly efficient metadata structure, which allows us to make effective caching decisions in a scalable way. By offloading non-essential metadata operations to GPU, we can further dedicate the limited CPU and memory resources to the main service operations for improved throughput and latency. We have developed a prototype based on Memcached. Our experimental results show that our scheme can significantly enhance the scalability and improve the cache system performance by a factor of up to 4.3. 

Time-series databases are becoming an indispensable component in today's data centers. In order to manage the rapidly growing time-series data, we need an effective and efficient system solution to handle the huge traffic of time-series data queries. A promising solution is to deploy a high-speed, large-capacity cache system to relieve the burden on the backend time-series databases and accelerate query processing. However, time-series data is drastically different from other traditional data workloads, bringing both challenges and opportunities. In this paper, we present a flash-based cache system design for time-series data, called TSCache . By exploiting the unique properties of time-series data, we have developed a set of optimization schemes, such as a slab-based data management, a two-layered data indexing structure, an adaptive time-aware caching policy, and a low-cost compaction process. We have implemented a prototype based on Twitter's Fatcache. Our experimental results show that TSCache can significantly improve client query performance, effectively increasing the bandwidth by a factor of up to 6.7 and reducing the latency by up to 84.2%.