Accelerating database operators using a network processor

Database management systems (DBMSs) do not take full advantage of modern microarchitectural resources, such as wide-issue out-of-order processor pipelines. Increases in processor clock rate and instruction-level parallelism have left memory accesses as the dominant bottleneck in DBMS execution. Prior research indicates that simultaneous multithreading (SMT) can hide memory access latency from a single thread and improve throughput by increasing the number of outstanding memory accesses. Rather than expend chip area and power on out-of-order execution, as in current SMT processors, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using many simple processor cores, each with hardware support for multiple thread contexts. This paper shows an existing hardware architecture—the network processor—already fits the model for multi-threaded, multi-core execution. Using an Intel IXP2400 network processor, we evaluate the performance of three key database operations and demonstrate improvements of 1.9X to 2.5X when compared to a generalpurpose processor.