Kangaroo: A flash cache optimized for tiny objects (2021)

What the research is: Kangaroo is a new flash cache that enables more efficient caching of tiny objects (objects that are ~100 bytes or less) and overcomes the challenges presented by existing flash cache designs. Since Kangaroo is implemented within CacheLib, Facebook’s open source caching engine, developers can use Kangaroo through CacheLib’s API to build their own customized cache services. We partnered with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) on this research. The resulting paper won the Best Paper award at the 2021 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) conference. Optimized for tiny objects, Kangaroo minimizes dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) usage and the number of writes — and introduces a new cache eviction policy that reduces cache misses with minimal DRAM overhead, further reducing load on back-end storage systems. Kangaroo’s CacheLib implementation also allowed our researchers to quickly evaluate the impact of Kangaroo’s design on real world production workloads. ... Read full article.