Heterogeneity-conscious parallel query execution
Tobias Mühlbauer, Wolf Rödiger, Robert Seilbeck, Alfons Kemper, Thomas Neumann · 2014
Physical and thermal restrictions hinder commensurate performance gains from the ever increasing transistor density. While multi-core scaling helped alleviate dimmed or dark silicon for some time, future processors will need to become more heterogeneous. To this end, single instruction set architecture (ISA) heterogeneous processors are a particularly interesting solution that combines multiple cores with the same ISA but asymmetric performance and power characteristics. These processors, however, are no free lunch for database systems. Mapping jobs to the core that fits best is notoriously hard for the operating system or a compiler. To achieve optimal performance and energy efficiency, heterogeneity needs to be exposed to the database system.