Cashing in on Caching
An Indian scientist comes up with a cheaper, better way of storing Web content
New Delhi February 26, 2009
For those with limited Internet access, an effective method of storing frequently accessed Web content is a much needed utility. Now, an Indian scientist has come up with a highly efficient method of caching Web pages on a local hard drive so that precious bandwidth is not wasted in retrieving the same information repeatedly.
Vivek Pai, a computer scientist at Princeton University, and his group have created HashCache, an amazingly evolved way of storing web content that promises to be far less expensive than conventional caching systems.
According to an article in the inaugural issue of Technology Review India, the technology used by HashCache ends a long drought in fundamental caching advances. Technology Review is the MIT’s magazine of innovation, the India edition of which is being unveiled by renowned physicist Prof MGK Menon at EmTech 2009 in Delhi next week
Current caching technologies require not only large hard disks to store old data but also lots of random-access memory (RAM) (which is fairly expensive and uses a lot of electricity) to store and index the “address” of each piece of content on the disk.
HashCache abolishes the index, slashing RAM and electricity requirements by roughly a factor of 10. A one-terabyte hard-disk cache could give students in a poor country much faster access to Webcontent.
Throughout the developing world, scarce Internet access is a bigger challenge when it comes to bridging the digital divide than a dearth of computers. For instance, Universities in Africa and parts of India are extremely bandwidth constrained. In India, there are only 4 million broadband connections currently to serve a population of 1.2 billion This innovation will make it significantly cheaper to run a very large caching server.
At EmTech 2009, one of the sessions in fact deals with the future of bandwidth and connectivity. Kuldeep Goyal, CMD of BSNL will discuss with Dr Sanjoy Paul, who heads convergence technology Lab at Infosys and Aravind Sitaraman, Vice President, CISCO Development Organisation the technology that connects our planet seamlessly together and the applications needed to cope with increasing bandwidth.
At Lab to Market sessions running concurrently during the event, participants can get to see latest technological advances that are going to transform user experiences in the Internet world and outside.
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