Synopsis
Roughly a decade ago, power consumption and heat dissipation concerns forced the semiconductor industry to radically change its course, shifting from sequential to parallel computing. Unfortunately, improving performance of applications has now become much more difficult than in the good old days of frequency scaling. This is also affecting databases and data processing applications in general, and has led to the popularity of so-called data appliances—specialized data processing engines, where software and hardware are sold together in a closed box. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) increasingly play an important role in such systems. FPGAs are attractive because the performance gains of specialized hardware can be significant, while power consumption is much less than that of commodity processors. On the other hand, FPGAs are way more flexible than hard-wired circuits (ASICs) and can be integrated into complex systems in many different ways, e.g., directly in the network for a high-frequency trading application. This book gives an introduction to FPGA technology targeted at a database audience. In the first few chapters, we explain in detail the inner workings of FPGAs. Then we discuss techniques and design patterns that help mapping algorithms to FPGA hardware so that the inherent parallelism of these devices can be leveraged in an optimal way. Finally, the book will illustrate a number of concrete examples that exploit different advantages of FPGAs for data processing. Table of Contents: Preface / Introduction / A Primer in Hardware Design / FPGAs / FPGA Programming Models / Data Stream Processing / Accelerated DB Operators / Secure Data Processing / Conclusions / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index
About the Author
Jens Teubner is leading the Databases and Information Sys tems Group at TU Dortmund in Germany. His main re search interest is data processing on modern hardware plat forms, including FPGAs, multi-core processors, and hardware accelerated networks. Previously, Jens Teubner was a postdoc toral researcher at ETH Zurich (2008–2013) and IBM Re search (2007–2008). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from TU München (Munich, Germany) and an M.S. degree in Physics from the University of Konstanz in Germany. Louis Woods is a Ph.D. student, who joined the Systems Group at ETH Zurich in 2009. His research interests in clude FPGAs in the context of databases, modern hardware, stream processing, parallel algorithms, and design patterns. Louis Woods received both his B.S. and M.S. degree in Com puter Science from ETH Zurich in 2008 and 2009, respec tively
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