Exploiting programmable network interfaces for parallel query execution in workstation clusters

Workstation clusters equipped with high performance interconnect having programmable network processors facilitate interesting opportunities to enhance the performance of parallel application run on them. In this paper, we propose schemes where certain application level processing in parallel database query execution is performed on the network processor. We evaluate the performance of TPC-H queries executing on a high end cluster where all tuple processing is done on the host processor, using a timed Petri net model, and find that tuple processing costs on the host processor dominate the execution time. These results are validated using a small cluster. We therefore propose 4 schemes where certain tuple processing activity is offloaded to the network processor. The first 2 schemes offload the tuple splitting activity – computation to identify the node on which to process the tuples,

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: V. Santhosh Kumar, Matthew J. Thazhuthaveetil, R. Govindarajan
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Host Processor, IPPS 2006, Network Processor, Tuple Processing