FPGAs for Data Processing: Current State

Author

Jens Teubner

Published

it — Information Technology, April 2017.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2016-0046

Abstract

To escape a number of physical limitations (e.g., bandwidth and thermal issues), hardware technology is strongly trending toward heterogeneous system designs, where a large share of the application work can be off-loaded to accelerators, such as graphics or network processors.

In the database domain, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) were recently discovered as a powerful class of co-processors. Data-intensive tasks can benefit from their very high bandwidth paired with a very low latency.

However, a number of challenges still have to be solved before FPGA-accelerated systems can go mainstream. Applications must leverage the massive parallelism provided by FPGAs; algorithms must be re-designed with awareness for communication; and new abstractions are needed to make system development effective.

In this article, we report on some of the results we obtained working toward solutions to these challenges. They have been carried out in the context of the Avalanche project, a pioneer in the use of FPGAs for database applications.

Publication Log

February 22, 2017

Camera-ready version submitted

camera-ready paper (PDF)

January 29, 2017

revised submission (PDF)
Accepted for publication on March 16, 2017.

October 27, 2016

original submission (PDF)
Decision on February 21, 2017 (minor revision)