Seer: Enabling Future-Aware Online Caching in Networked Systems

Explore a groundbreaking approach to online caching in networked systems through this 18-minute conference talk from NSDI '24. Delve into Seer, an innovative solution that leverages network packet delays to predict future state access requests, enabling smarter prefetching and cache eviction decisions. Discover how this future-aware caching technique significantly outperforms traditional methods like LRU, achieving up to 65% lower cache miss ratios and 78% reduced flow completion times for key network applications. Gain insights into the potential of exploiting network characteristics to bridge the performance gap between online caching heuristics and optimal offline algorithms in state-intensive network and distributed applications.