Exploiting locality for data management in systems of limited bandwidth

This paper deals with data management in computer systems in which the computing nodes are connected by a relatively sparse network. We consider the problem of placing and accessing a set of shared objects that are read and written from the nodes in the network. These objects are, e.g., global variables in a parallel program, pages or cache lines in a virtual shared memory system, shared files in a distributed file system, or pages in the World Wide Web. A data management strategy consists of a placement strategy that maps the objects (possibly dynamically and with redundancy) to the nodes, and an access strategy that describes how reads and writes are handled by the system (including the routing). We investigate static and dynamic data management strategies.