Data Parallel Bin-Based Indexing for Answering Queries on Multi-core Architectures

The multi-core trend in CPUs and general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) offers new opportunities for the database community. The increase of cores at exponential rates is likely to affect virtually every server and client in the coming decade, and presents database management systems with a huge, compelling disruption that will radically change how processing is done. This paper presents a new parallel indexing data structure for answering queries that takes full advantage of the increasing thread-level parallelism emerging in multi-core architectures. In our approach, our Data Parallel Bin-based Index Strategy (DP-BIS) first bins the base data, and then partitions and stores the values in each bin as a separate, bin-based data cluster. In answering a query, the procedures for examining the bin numbers and the bin-based data clusters offer the maximum possible level of concurrency; each record is evaluated by a single thread and all threads are processed simultaneously in parallel.

We implement and demonstrate the effectiveness of DP-BIS on two multi-core architectures: a multi-core CPU and a GPU. The concurrency afforded by DP-BIS allows us to fully utilize the thread-level parallelism provided by each architecture–for example, our GPU-based DP-BIS implementation simultaneously evaluates over 12,000 records with an equivalent number of concurrently executing threads. In comparing DP-BIS’s performance across these architectures, we show that the GPU-based DP-BIS implementation requires significantly less computation time to answer a query than the CPU-based implementation. We also demonstrate in our analysis that DP-BIS provides better overall performance than the commonly utilized CPU and GPU-based projection index. Finally, due to data encoding, we show that DP-BIS accesses significantly smaller amounts of data than index strategies that operate solely on a column’s base data; this smaller data footprint is critical for parallel processors that possess limited memory resources (e.g. GPUs).