high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

With recent advancement on hardware technologies, new general-purpose high-performance devices have been widely adopted, such as the graphics processing unit (GPU) and solid state drive (SSD). GPU may offer an order of higher throughput for applications with massive data parallelism, compared with the multicore CPU. Moreover, new storage device SSD is also capable of offering a much higher I/O throughput and lower latency than a traditional hard disk device (HDD). These new hardware devices can significantly boost the performance of many applications; thus the database community has been actively engaging in adopting them into database systems. However, the performance benefit cannot be easily reaped if the new hardwares are improperly used. In this paper, we propose Hetero-DB, a high-performance database system by exploiting both the characteristics of the database system and the special properties of the new hardware devices in system’s design and implementation. Hetero-DB develops a GPU-aware query execution engine with GPU device memory management and query scheduling mechanism to support concurrent query execution. Furthermore, with the SSD-HDD hybrid storage system, we redesign the storage engine by organizing HDD and SSD into a two-level caching hierarchy in Hetero-DB. To best utilize the hybrid hardware devices, the semantic information that is critical for storage I/O is identified and passed to the storage manager, which has a great potential to improve the efficiency and performance. Hetero-DB aims to maximize the performance benefits of GPU and SSD, and demonstrates the effectiveness for designing next generation database systems.