Parallel Computation of Skyline Queries

  • Authors:
  • Louis Woods;Gustavo Alonso;Jens Teubner

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • FCCM '13 Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 21st Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Due to stagnant clock speeds and high power consumption of commodity microprocessors, database vendors have started to explore massively parallel co-processors such as FPGAs to further increase performance. A typical approach is to push simple but compute-intensive operations (e.g., pre-filtering, (de)compression) to FPGAs for acceleration. In this paper, we show how a significantly more complex operation - the computation of the skyline - can be holistically implemented on an FPGA. A skyline query computes the pare to optimal set of multi-dimensional data points. These queries have been studied in software extensively over the last decade but this paper is the first to examine skyline computation in hardware. We propose a methodology that interleaves data storage and computation, allowing multiple operations to be executed on the same working set in parallel, while accounting for all data dependencies. Our experiments show that we achieve very promising results compared to CPU-based solutions.