FPGA-accelerated group-by aggregation using synchronizing caches

Abstract

Recent trends in hardware have dramatically dropped the price of RAM and shifted focus from systems operating on disk-resident data to in-memory solutions. In this environment high memory access latency, also known as memory wall, becomes the biggest data processing bottleneck. Traditional CPU-based architectures solved this problem by introducing large cache hierarchies. However algorithms which experience poor locality can limit the benefits of caching. In turn, hardware multithreading provides a generic solution that does not rely on algorithm-specific locality properties.