The end of Moore's law and the rise of the data processor

Abstract

With the end of Moore's Law, database architects are turning to hardware accelerators to offload computationally intensive tasks from the CPU. In this paper, we show that accelerators can facilitate far more than just computation: they enable algorithms and data structures that lavishly expand computation in order to optimize for disparate cost metrics. We introduce the Pliops Extreme Data Processor (XDP), a novel storage engine implemented from the ground up using customized hardware. At its core, XDP consists of an accelerated hash table to index the data in storage using less memory and fewer storage accesses for queries than the best alternative. XDP also employs an accelerated compressor, a capacitor, and a lock-free RAID sub-system to minimize storage space and recovery time while minimizing performance penalties. As a result, XDP overcomes cost contentions that have so far been inescapable.