Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
Revenge of the database machine? Towards a hardware-software approach for high-performance databases
Jignesh Patel
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract:
Database applications have an insatiable appetite for higher performance. In the past, a large part of this appetite has been fed by leveraging the gift of Moore’s Law. The slowing down of Moore’s Law now requires a new approach. Fortunately, the hardware landscape is undergoing a Cambrian explosion in new architectures, and in this talk, I will describe how one class of architecture may provide part of the answer in our search for future high-performance database systems. This architecture called PIM, packages compute and storage closely, and appears to be a good candidate to accelerate database analytic workloads. However, as I will describe in this talk, a true hardware-software co-design strategy is needed to engineer critical changes on both sides to achieve high performance. This talk will also highlight how there are rich opportunities in redesigning core database kernels to work with a broader class of hardware by considering circuit-level parallelism that is present in most computing substrates. Finally, I will go back five decades and connect to the early days of the database field when a similar co-design approach (then called database machines) was dominant, and how that history may hold valuable lessons for the path forward.
Bio:
Jignesh Patel is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he also has an affiliate position in the Biostatistics and Medical Informatics department. His research interests are in data management systems. His papers have been selected as best papers in the conference in several top database venues, including SIGMOD and VLDB. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, and the IEEE organizations. He has also won teaching awards at the U. Wisconsin and the U. Michigan. He has a keen interest in technology transfer from university research, and he has spun four startups from his research group. Further, at Wisconsin, he has co-founded entrepreneurship organizations at both the department and the university levels to help other entrepreneurs.
