FPGA: what's in it for a database?

While there seems to be a general agreement that next years' systems will include many processing cores, it is often overlooked that these systems will also include an increasing number of different cores (we already see dedicated units for graphics or network processing). Orchestrating the diversity of processing functionality is going to be a major challenge in the upcoming years, be it to optimize for performance or for minimal energy consumption. We expect field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs or"programmable hardware") to soon play the role of yet another processing unit, found in commodity computers. It is clear that the new resource is going to be too precious to be ignored by database systems, but it is unclear how FPGAs could be integrated into a DBMS. With a focus on database use, this tutorial introduces into the emerging technology, demonstrates its potential, but also pinpoints some challenges that need to be addressed before FPGA-accelerated database syste...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Jens Teubner, René Müller
• Keywords: Database, Database Processing, FPGA-accelerated Database Systems, FPGAs Or"programmable Hardware, SIGMOD 2009