Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments

This paper proposes the use of repetitive broadcast as a way of augmenting the memory hierarchy of clients in an asymmetric communication environment. We describe a new technique called “Broadcast Disks” for structuring the broadcast in a way that provides improved performance for non-uniformly accessed data. The Broadcast Disk superimposes multiple disks spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel — in effect creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. In addition to proposing and defining the mechanism, a main result of this work is that exploiting the potential of the broadcast structure requires a reevaluation of basic cache managementpolicies. We examine several “pure” cache management policies and develop and measure implementable approximations to these policies. These results and others are presented in a set of simulation studies that substantiates the basic idea and develops some of the intuitions required to design a particular broadcast program.