Massachussetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review has named HashCache in its annual list of 10 emerging technologies that have the potential to change the world. “When people access the Web, very often the same content gets accessed repeatedly. There is a technique called Web caching that stores this content on a disk, rather than pull it from the Internet each time. But current approaches to caching do not allow you to easily use very large disks. As large disks are getting very cheap, we needed a new way to use such storage,” Pai told The Sunday Express.

HashCache allows you 10 times more disk storage than was possible earlier. “Conversely, if you want to use the same disk space as other systems, HashCache requires one-tenth the memory to access it,” Pai added. It has been successfully test-deployed on relatively low-end computers in Ghana and Nigeria, where it was found to be operating unobtrusively and speeding up Internet access. Pai and his colleagues at Princeton and PlanetLab, a global research testbed, are testing the technology with a wider audience.

Estimates put Internet penetration in India at less than 5 per cent of the population, of which the number of customers using high-speed broadband services is a mere 5.65 million. This means there is plenty of scope for growth in the sector, and HashCache could well be the catalyst.

Other than fixing his in-laws’ computer at Dombivili, Mumbai, four years ago, Pai, whose parents moved to the US when he was two, hasn’t worked in India. His research, though, is aimed at improving Internet access in developing countries. He has also been involved in the development of CoDeeN, a Web proxy cache system that moves frequently-accessed content closer to users and speeds up Internet access.

Researchers who collaborated with Pai on the HashCache project include PhD student and IIT-Madras graduate Anirudh Badam, KyoungSoo Park, professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Larry Peterson, professor and department chair at Princeton, and Marc Fiuczynski, research scientist at Princeton.