Princeton University       Office of Technology Licensing and Intellectual Property

                                                Fourth Floor, New South Building

                                                Post Office Box 36 PRIVATE 

                                                Princeton, New Jersey 08544-0036

                                                Phone: (609) 258-6762

                                                FAX: (609) 258-1159

 

 

HASHCACHE, AN INDEXING MECHANISM FOR CACHING FILESYSTEMS

 

 

            Researchers at Princeton University have developed a new method to index caching filesystems that uses an order of magnitude less memory that existing systems.  Princeton is currently seeking industrial collaborators to commercialize this technology.

 

The new process has increased scalability and performance benefits, and makes it simpler to consolidate multiple server applications.  The new indexing mechanism provides an index in to filesystem at a main memory usage ratio of 1:10000 with the disk, it is able to index 10,000 bits on the secondary storage with one bit in main memory. Currently, the best approach has a ratio of 1:500, efficiency of indexing has been increased by a factor of 20. HashCache employs hash functions and set associativity to achieve this ratio.  The current technologies use multiple abstractions like hash table data structures with chaining, free space allocation and maintenance data structures to organize data layout on the device. HashCache eliminates all these data structures and replaces them with one single efficient abstraction.

 

It is anticipated that this technology will be extremely useful in reduction of use of main memory for indexing, preventing the reduction of performance of the web proxy.

 

            Patent protection is pending.

 

            For more information please contact:

 

                        William H. Gowen

                        Office of Technology Licensing and Intellectual Property

                        Princeton University

                        4 New South Building

                        Princeton, NJ 08544-0036

                        (609) 258-6762

                        (609) 258-1159 fax

                        wgowen@princeton.edu