Improving Data Access Performance with Server Push Architecture

Data prefetching, where data is fetched before CPU demands for it, has been considered as an effective solution to mask data access latency. However, the current client-initiated prefetching strategies do not work well for applications with complex, non-contiguous data access patterns. While technology advances continue to enlarge the gap between computing and data access performance, trading computing power for data access delay has become a natural choice. We propose a server-based data-push approach. In this server-push architecture, a dedicated server named data push server (DPS) initiates and proactively pushes data closer to the client in time. We present the DPS architecture and study the issues such as what data to fetch, when to fetch, how to push, and data access modeling.