Uncore your Queries: Towards CPU-less Query Processing

Accelerators allow computation to be offloaded from the CPU and improve query performance.Intel has recently introduced a dedicated Data Accelerator Complex (DAC) for its scalable Xeon processor family.Among the four accelerators, the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) provides functionality for offloading query processing operations from the CPU.In this work, we investigate the potential of this accelerator for database queries.We propose a coreless query processing approach in which query operators such as scan, filter, but also sorting, and joins are executed on the accelerator.Our evaluation shows that offloading tasks such as filter and join operators to IAA achieves performance comparable to highthread-count CPU processing.Further speedups on compressed data enable the DBMS to free CPU resources more efficiently for other tasks.