Leveraging Heterogeneous Hardware

The computer architecture community is moving toward commoditization of hardware specialization instead of general purpose CPUs and more agile hardware development instead of years-long production cycles to enable faster, more energy-efficient, and more cost-effective hardware/software co-designs. This will lead to a disruption in the way we design and maintain the emerging data management systems as well. As the heterogeneity of hardware resources increase, it becomes essential for the data management systems to decide on the optimal design options based on the processor types they are running on. This project targets identifying the granularity of data management tasks for different workloads that can be offloaded from a general purpose CPU to specialized hardware (e.g., GPU, FPGA) or low-power cores (e.g., ARM), and figuring out how to perform this offloading efficiently. This would be split into several sub-projects targeting specific workloads and hardware types.