2012 Reports

Hardware-Accelerated Range Partitioning

Wu, Lisa K.; Barker, Raymond John; Kim, Martha Allen; Ross, Kenneth A.

With global pool of data growing at over 2.5 quinitillion bytes per day and over 90% of all data in existence created in the last two years alone, there can be little doubt that we have entered the big data era. This trend has brought database performance to the forefront of high throughput, low energy system design. This paper explores targeted deployment of hardware accelerators to improve the throughput and efficiency of database processing. Partitioning, a critical operation when manipulating large data sets, is often the limiting factor in database performance, and represents a significant amount of the overall runtime of database processing workloads. This paper describes a hardware-software streaming framework and a hardware accelerator for range partitioning, or HARP. The streaming framework offers seamless execution environment for database processing elements such as HARP. HARP offers performance, as well as orders of magnitude gains in power and area efficiency. A detailed analysis of a 32nm physical design shows 9.3 times the throughput of a highly optimized and optimistic software implementation, while consuming just 3.6% of the area and 2.6% of the power of a single Xeon core in the same technology generation.