Today’s computing systems are highly heterogeneous, both in terms of the hardware that they are built from and the software that they run. This heterogeneity is both a benefit and a challenge. On the one hand, specialized processors provide the performance necessary to process increasing amounts of data, and specialized software system enable programmers with different needs and expertise to extract knowledge from data. On the other hand, the need to integrate heterogeneous hardware and software into a cohesive whole increases the complexity of our computing infrastructure.
In this talk, we investigate how heterogeneous hardware and software impacts query processing, and develop tools to manage this heterogeneity. First, we present a survey of query processing systems that target both CPUs and GPUs. Second, we investigate how sensitive CPUs and GPUs are to operator implementation details and describe how a query processing system can adapt its low-level operator implementation to the processor it runs on. Third, we describe how to execute Java-based user-defined functions inside a query processing engine written in C++. Our investigation shows that we often face similar challenges when integrating heterogeneous hardware and software.
Viktor Rosenfeld is a PhD student at the Database Systems and Information Management group at Technische Universität Berlin, supervised by Prof. Volker Markl. His research interests include optimizing query execution on modern heterogeneous processors.