JEDI: model-driven trace generation for cache simulations

A major obstacle for caching research is the increasing difficulty of obtaining original traces from production caching systems. Original traces are voluminous and also may contain private and proprietary information, and hence not generally made available to the public. The lack of original traces hampers our ability to evaluate new cache designs and provides the rationale for JEDI, our new synthetic trace generation tool. JEDI generates a synthetic trace that is "similar" to the original trace collected from a production cache, in particular, the two traces have similar object-level properties and produce similar hit rates in a cache simulation. JEDI uses a novel traffic model called Popularity-Size Footprint Descriptor (pFD) that concisely captures key properties of the original trace and uses the pFD to generate the synthetic trace. We show that the synthetic traces produced by JEDI can be used to accurately simulate a wide range of cache admission and eviction algorithms and the hit rates obtained from these simulations correspond closely to those obtained from simulations that use the original traces. JEDI will be provided to the public as open-source, along with a library of pFD's computed from traffic classes hosted on Akamai's production CDN. This will allow researchers to produce realistic synthetic traces for their own caching research.