SWissBox: An Architecture for Data Processing Appliances

Database appliances offer fully integrated hardware, storage, operating system, database, and related software in a single package. Database appliances have a relatively long history but the advent of multicore architectures and cloud computing have facilitated and accelerated the demand for such integrated solutions. Database appliances represent a significant departure from the architecture of traditional systems mainly because of the cross layer optimizations that are possible. In this paper we describe SwissBox, an architecture for data processing appliances being developed at the Systems Group of ETH Zurich. SwissBox combines a number of innovations at all system levels – from customized hardware (FPGAs), an operating systems that treats multicore machines as distributed systems (Barrelfish), to an elastic storage manager that takes advantage of both muticores and clusters (Crescando)– to provide a completely new platform for system development and database research. In the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CIDR
• Authors: Gustavo Alonso, Donald Kossmann, Timothy Roscoe
• Keywords: Algorithms, CIDR 2011, ETH Zürich, Package Database, Storage Manager