FPGAs: A New Point in the Database Design Space
René Müller and Jens Teubner
Proceedings 13th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (Tutorial)
paper (PDF), presentation slides (PDF)
In line with the insight that “one size” of databases will not fit all application needs, the database community is currently exploring various alternatives to commodity, CPU-based system designs. One particular candidate in this trend are field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), programmable chips that allow tailor-made hardware designs optimized for specific systems, applications, or even user queries.
With a focus on database use, this tutorial introduces into FPGA technology, demonstrates its potential, but also pinpoints some challenges that need to be addressed before FPGA-accelerated database systems can go mainstream. The goal of this tutorial is to develop an intuition of an FPGA development cycle, receive guidelines for a “good” FPGA design, but also learn the limitations that hardware-implemented database processing faces. Our more high-level ambition is to spur a broader interest in database processing on novel hardware technology.
camera-ready for EDBT 2010
submission to EDBT 2010 (accepted)