A morsel-driven query execution engine for heterogeneous multi-cores

Abstract

Currently, we face the next major shift in processor designs that arose from the physical limitations known as the "dark silicon effect". Due to thermal limitations and shrinking transistor sizes, multi-core scaling is coming to an end. A major new direction that hardware vendors are currently investigating involves specialized and energy-efficient hardware accelerators (e.g., ASICs) placed on the same die as the normal CPU cores. In this paper, we present a novel query processing engine called SiliconDB that targets such heterogeneous processor environments. We leverage the Sparc M7 platform to develop and test our ideas. Based on the SSB benchmarks, as well as other micro benchmarks, we compare the efficiency of SiliconDB with existing execution strategies that make use of co-processors (e.g., FPGAs, GPUs) and demonstrate speed-up improvements of up to 2x.