MICA: a holistic approach to fast in-memory key-value storage

MICA is a scalable in-memory key-value store that han-dles 65.6 to 76.9 million key-value operations per second using a single general-purpose multi-core system. MICA is over 4–13.5x faster than current state-of-the-art sys-tems, while providing consistently high throughput over a variety of mixed read and write workloads. MICA takes a holistic approach that encompasses all aspects of request handling, including parallel data access, network request handling, and data structure design, but makes unconventional choices in each of the three do-mains. First, MICA optimizes for multi-core architectures by enabling parallel access to partitioned data. Second, for efficient parallel data access, MICA maps client re-quests directly to specific CPU cores at the server NIC level by using client-supplied information and adopts a light-weight networking stack that bypasses the kernel. Finally, MICA’s new data structures—circular logs, lossy concurrent hash indexes, and bulk chaining—handle both read- and write-intensive workloads at low overhead. 1