RIOT: I/O-Efficient Numerical Computing without SQL

R is a numerical computing environment that is widely popular for statistical data analysis. Like many such environments, R performs poorly for large datasets whose sizes exceed that of physical memory. We present our vision of RIOT (R with I/O Transparency), a system that makes R programs I/O-efficient in a way transparent to the users. We describe our experience with RIOT-DB, an initial prototype that uses a relational database system as a backend. Despite the overhead and inadequacy of generic database systems in handling array data and numerical computation, RIOT-DB significantly outperforms R in many large-data scenarios, thanks to a suite of high-level, inter-operation optimizations that integrate seamlessly into R. While many techniques in RIOT are inspired by databases (and, for RIOT-DB, realized by a database system), RIOT users are insulated from anything database related. Compared with previous approaches that require users to learn new languages and rewrite their programs ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CIDR
• Authors: Yi Zhang 0011, Herodotos Herodotou, Jun Yang 0001
• Keywords: CIDR 2007, CIDR 2009, Database System, Numerical Computing, Numerical Computing Environment