The bionic DBMS is coming, but what will it look like? Ryan Johnson Ippokratis Pandis University of Toronto IBM Almaden Research Center
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 10% serial Software has always ruled database engines, and commodity processors riding Moore's Law doomed database machines of 1% serial the 1980s from the start. However, today's hardware land- 10% serial scape is very different, and moving in directions that make 0.1% serial database machines increasingly attractive. Stagnant clock Over speeds, looming dark silicon, availability of reconfigurable power hardware, and the economic clout of cloud providers all align 1% serial 0.01% serial power 0.1% serial budget to make custom database hardware economically viable or budget even necessary. Dataflow workloads (business intelligence and (a) 2011 (64 cores) (b) 2018 (1024 cores) streaming) already benefit from emerging hardware support. In this paper, we argue that control flow workloads|with Figure 1: Fraction of chip (from top-left) utilized at their corresponding latencies|are another feasible target various degrees of parallelism. for hardware support. To make our point, we outline a transaction processing architecture that offloads much of its functionality to reconfigurable hardware. We predict a con- incentive and the economic clout to commission custom hard- vergence to fully \bionic" database engines that implement ware if it lowers overall hardware costs or otherwise gives nearly all key functionality directly in hardware and relegate some edge over other providers [5]. software to a largely managerial role. The community is already responding to these trends, and recent years have seen a variety of efforts, both commercial 1.