FPGAs: a new point in the database design space

  • Authors:
  • Rene Mueller;Jens Teubner

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Extending Database Technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In line with the insight that "one size" of databases will not fit all application needs [19] the database community is currently exploring various alternatives to commodity, CPU-based system designs. One particular candidate in this trend are field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), programmable chips that allow tailor-made hardware designs optimized for specific systems, applications, or even user queries. With a focus on database use, this tutorial introduces into FPGA technology, demonstrates its potential, but also pinpoints some challenges that need to be addressed before FPGA-accelerated database systems can go mainstream. The goal of this tutorial is to develop an intuition of an FPGA development cycle, receive guidelines for a "good" FPGA design, but also learn the limitations that hardware-implemented database processing faces. Our more high-level ambition is to spur a broader interest in database processing on novel hardware technology.