First Investigations of the Vector Supercomputer SX-Aurora TSUBASA as a Co-Processor for Database Systems

Abstract

The hardware landscape is currently changing from homogeneous multi-core systems towards heterogeneous systems with many different computing units, each with their own characteristics. This trend is a great opportunity for database systems to increase the overall performance if the heterogeneous resources can be utilized efficiently. Following that trend, NEC cooperation has recently introduced a novel heterogeneous hardware system called SX-Aurora TSUBASA. This novel heterogeneous system features a strong vector engine as a (co-)processor providing world’s highest memory bandwidth of 1.2TB/s per vector processor. From a database system perspective, where many operations are memory bound, this bandwidth is very interesting. Thus, we describe the unique architecture and properties of this novel heterogeneous system in this paper. Moreover, we present first database-specific evaluation results to show the benefit of this system to increase the query performance. We conclude the paper with an outlook on our ongoing research activities in this direction.