Speaker: Asaf Cidon, Stanford Unviersity Title: Cliffhanger: Scaling Performance Cliffs in Web Memory Caches Date/time: 12:30-1:30pm Monday May 2, with lunch available starting at noon Location: CS 302 Abstract: Web-scale applications are heavily reliant on memory cache systems such as Memcached to improve throughput and reduce user latency. Small performance improvements in these systems can result in large end-to-end gains. By analyzing measurements from a widely used caching service, Memcachier, we demonstrate that existing cache allocation techniques leave significant room for improvement. We develop Cliffhanger, a lightweight iterative algorithm that runs on memory cache servers, which incrementally optimizes the resource allocations across and within applications based on dynamically changing workloads. We also present our long term vision for a centrally controlled data center caching layer that manages applications' varying workloads across heterogeneous caches. Bio: Asaf Cidon is the CEO and co-founder of Sookasa, which was acquired by Barracuda Networks in March 2016. He completed his PhD at the Stanford University Computer Systems Lab, where he conducted research on cloud storage under Professors Mendel Rosenblum and Sachin Katti. Asaf previously worked at Google Israel in the web search team and served as a team leader in the Israeli army. He obtained his PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and his BS in Computer and Software Engineering Cum Laude from the Technion. In addition, he is a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and Sohnis Promising Scientist Award.