Analyzing scientific data sharing patterns for in-network data caching

TL;DR

This study analyzes scientific data sharing and demonstrates that in-network data caching significantly reduces network bandwidth usage and improves application performance in scientific networks.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed analysis of data sharing patterns and quantifies the benefits of in-network caching for scientific data transfer efficiency.

Findings

Network bandwidth demand reduced by nearly a factor of 3

In-network caching decreases redundant data transfers

Application performance improves with local data access

Abstract

The volume of data moving through a network increases with new scientific experiments and simulations. Network bandwidth requirements also increase proportionally to deliver data within a certain time frame. We observe that a significant portion of the popular dataset is transferred multiple times to different users as well as to the same user for various reasons. In-network data caching for the shared data has shown to reduce the redundant data transfers and consequently save network traffic volume. In addition, overall application performance is expected to improve with in-network caching because access to the locally cached data results in lower latency. This paper shows how much data was shared over the study period, how much network traffic volume was consequently saved, and how much the temporary in-network caching increased the scientific application performance. It also analyzes data access patterns in applications and the impacts of caching nodes on the regional data repository. From the results, we observed that the network bandwidth demand was reduced by nearly a factor of 3 over the study period.