Q100: The architecture and design of a Database Processing Unit

In this paper, we propose Database Processing Units, or DPUs, a class of domain-specific database processors that can efficiently handle database applications. As a proof of concept, we present the instruction set architecture, microarchitecture, and hardware implementation of one DPU, called Q100. The Q100 has a collection of heterogeneous ASIC tiles that process relational tables and columns quickly and energy-efficiently. The architecture uses coarse grained instructions that manipulate streams of data, thereby maximizing pipeline and data parallelism, and minimizing the need to time multiplex the accelerator tiles and spill intermediate results to memory. This work explores a Q100 design space of 150 configurations, selecting three for further analysis: a small, power-conscious implementation, a high-performance implementation, and a balanced design that maximizes performance per Watt. We then demonstrate that the power-conscious Q100 handles the TPC-H queries with three orders of magnitude less energy than a state of the art software DBMS, while the performance-oriented design outperforms the same DBMS by 70X. 7. Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Duke Scholars

Author Lisa Wills Computer Science