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Department of Computer Science

New Hardware Architectures for Data Management

Title

New Hardware Architectures for Data Management / Neue Hardwarearchitekturen für das Datenmanagement

Authors

Cagri Balkesen, Louis Woods, and Jens Teubner

Published

Database Systems for Business, Technology and the Web (BTW)

Download

abstract (PDF), handouts (PDF)

Abstract

For decades, the "dividend" of Moore's Law has been extraordinarily successful in building ever faster computer systems that accelerate application software almost automatically. The limits of this approach are becoming increasingly apparent and it is now clear that significant increases in performance will only be possible in the future through a high degree of hardware specialization. This trend has already been successfully implemented in practice for floating point or graphics operations.

The tutorial will therefore discuss the consequences that new hardware technology has on data-intensive applications; first and foremost, we will discuss the consequences for database management systems. At the beginning of the tutorial, we will look at innovations in computer system architecture that have already become established in practice, from concepts such as deep cache hierarchies, parallelism and multi-core systems to so-called NUMA systems. It will become clear how important a suitable access pattern (for example to the main memory of the system, but also between parallel units of the system) can be for the runtime of algorithms and it will be shown how database algorithms can be constructed so that they have suitable access patterns.

We will then discuss co-processors as "real" specialized hardware. In particular, we will focus on graphics processing units (GPUs) and programmable logic devices (FPGAs), as these have proven to be particularly useful in the context of a database application. Based on the internal architecture of the respective technology, we will show how co-processors are programmed and how their functionality can be integrated into an overall system

The aim of the tutorial will be to convey the specific characteristics of the various technologies. This will enable the participants to evaluate the costs and benefits of using special hardware for a given application context.