Patent attributes
A caching system is provided. The computing infrastructure runs off of a centralized storage, and data stored on the centralized store can also be retrieved from nearby machines that are part of the local infrastructure and have recently accessed the centralized store. Address-to-digest mappings are used to find an index of the desired data block. That digest is then used to hold where the data block is being cached. In some embodiments, the digest is hashed and the hash of the digest is used to determine where the data block is being cached. The data block is accessed from the cache using its cache, therefore different addresses may result in the retrieval of the same data block. For example, in a virtual machine environment, two different nodes may retrieve the same data block using different addresses.