Reading: Cheap and Large CAMS for High Performance Data-Intensive Network Systems (NSDI’10)

This paper presents how to build cheap and large CAMs (what’s CAM?) using a combination of DRAM and flash memory(SSD) to balance the cost and query latency. The main approach of this work is building multiple small hash tables, which are stored on SSD, and holding a two-level bloom-filter in RAM to provide fast hash value lookup. As the author claimed, this work aims to improve the lookup latency but not throughput. By grouping hash values into small groups and flush them in batch mode, it reduces the latency of the costly in-place insert/delete on SSD devices.