CNS Core: Medium: SmartNIC-Accelerated Database Systems

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Databases power many of the largest and most commonly used Internet services and applications in the world. Today, these systems are run in a distributed fashion across multiple machines or even across data centers, driven by the growing volumes of data and the growing scale of Internet services. The network communication is becoming a severe bottleneck in distributed databases. Recently, a new technology, SmartNIC, has been invented to add intelligence into the network interface card (NIC) to reduce the computation overhead of host processor. This new hardware device has great potential in accelerating distributed database operations. The goal of this project is to explore opportunities in this design space. The proposed work will develop SmartNIC-accelerated high performance distributed databases for both online-analytical processing (OLAP) and online-transactional processing (OLTP) workloads. The work can improve both on-premise and cloud distributed databases and add significant value to society at large. The proposal work can potentially be integrated into commercial distributed databases, leading to high performance and low latency for internet services and applications which can bring benefits to individual customers. The software developed through this project will be incorporated into existing open source big data stacks and database systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.