There will be no meeting on April 19th, since Justin Yip will be defending his PhD thesis at the same time. If you are interested, please show up and give him some support. Our next meeting takes place on the following Tuesday (April 26th).

  • Speaker: Irina Calciu
  • Date: April 26th, 2011 (Tuesday)
  • Room: CIT 506
  • Paper: Tudor-Ioan Salomie, Ionut Subasu, Jana Giceva, Gustavo Alonso. "Database Engines on Multicores, Why Parallelize When You Can Distribute?" [pdf] [slides]
  • Venue: EuroSys 2011
  • Abstract:

Multicore computers pose a substantial challenge to infrastructure software such as operating systems or databases. Such software typically evolves slower than the underlying hardware, and with multicore it faces structural limitations that can be solved only with radical architectural changes. In this paper we argue that, as has been suggested for operating systems, databases could treat multicore architectures as a distributed system rather than trying to hide the parallel nature of the hardware. We ?rst analyze the limitations of database engines when running on multicores using MySQL and PostgreSQL as examples. We then show how to deploy several replicated engines within a single multicore machine to achieve better scalability and stability than a single database engine operating on all cores. The resulting system offers a low overhead alternative to having to redesign the database engine while providing signi?cant performance gains for an important class of workloads.