This award supports a three year project to continue investigation of Internet web caching. It is a follow-on to a successful two year project which deployed caching servers at the five NSF-funded supercomputing centers and at FIX-West. The project resulted in considerable international participation and an early version of caching software called Squid which is now being used at over 400 sites. This follow-on project does the following: ... encourage greater U.S. participation. ... continue Squid code development and maintain the public domain code base for experimentation and collaboration. ... hold at least one workshop to improve exchange of ideas among caching researchers. ... standardize the Internet Caching Protocol (ICP) to assure interoperability between implementations. ... develop an automatic cache discovery system. ... assist in improving the web software, http, to support caching. ... collaborate with other caching research groups to use multicast for distributing data between caches. ... develop specifications for high performance caching hardware, and work with the vendors in developing such equipment. ... investigate research questions such as scaling, recording system performance and information provider hit statistics, and improving statistics gathering to enable better caching simulations.
