Database Techniques for New Hardware

In the last decade, computer hardware progresses with leaps and bounds. The advancements of hardware include: widely application of multi-core CPUs, using of GPUs in data intensive tasks, bigger and bigger main memory capacity, maturity and production use of non-volatile memory etc. Database systems immediately benefit from faster CPU/GPU and bigger memory, and run faster. However, there are some pitfalls. For example, database systems running on multicore processors may suffer from cache conflicts when the number of concurrently executing DB processes increases. To fully exploit advantages of new hardware to improve the performance of database systems, database software should be more or less revised (Ailamaki, 2004). This chapter introduces some efforts of database research community in this aspect. And the following section gives a brief introduction to some new hardware technologies that database systems could utilized.