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HarmonyCache: Scalable In-Network Cache With Read-Write Separation

delete2026-02-12
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PRE
AI
J
Jiangyuan Chen
X
Xiaohua Xu
W
Wenfei Wu
DOI:10.1109/TPDS.2026.3664186delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
"In key-value storage systems, a small number of hot items account for most traffic. Skewed workloads lead to load imbalance among servers, and those holding hotspots become system bottlenecks, degrading overall performance. Recent studies show that load imbalance can be eliminated by deploying a small, fast cache node in front of back-end servers, i.e., in-network cache. Programmable switches enable placing such caches on switches where traffic must pass. Although existing in-network cache schemes effectively balance loads in large-scale storage systems, they perform poorly under write-intensive workloads and lose scalability with growing clients due to imbalanced cache nodes. This paper introduces HarmonyCache, a scalable, high-performance in-network cache system that supports write-back. HarmonyCache employs cache replication and read-write separation: only one cache node handles write requests, while others serve reads only. To achieve scalability and minimize coherence overhead, HarmonyCache proposes an adaptive cache replication scheme to determine where and how many replicas to deploy. In addition, we design heterogeneous in-network caches using different switch resources and propose a hybrid caching scheme. Prototype and extensive experiments show that HarmonyCache significantly improves throughput under various access patterns (read/write-intensive), achieving up to 7.6× throughput gain over state-of-the-art solutions under skewed write-intensive workloads.
Keywords:
In-network cache
programmable switch
P4
key-value store

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems cover
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
IF:
6
Papers:
5.2K
Citations:
1.1W

Organization

P
peking university
Scholars:
11.9W
Papers: 8.7W
Citations: 146
U
university of science and technology of china
Scholars:
1.0W
Papers: 3.9K
Citations: 3
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