A new cooperative caching mechanism, PACA, along with a caching algorithm, LRU-Interleaved, and an aggressive prefetching algorithm, Full-File-On-Open, are presented. The caching algorithm is especially targeted to parallel machines running a microkernel-based operating system. It avoids the cache coherence problem with no loss in performance. Comparing our algorithm with another cooperative cache one (N-Chance Forwarding), in the above environment, better results have been obtained by LRU-Interleaved. We also evaluate an aggressive prefetching algorithm that highly increases read performance taking advantage of the huge caches cooperative caching offers.
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (CICYT) under the TIC-94-537 and TIC-95-0429 contracts.