The Oracle database is the world's leading data management product. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, engineers from Oracle and Sun started work on a new category of microprocessor designed to process data several times faster, many times more efficiently, and qualitatively safer. This kind of goal cannot be reached by running software unchanged -- we needed to design new hardware and write new software at all levels of the system to utilize it. The approach we took, and are taking, exploits the following ideas:
In this talk, I will describe the experience that drives our acceleration priorities, the constraints and joys of the hardware-software co-design process, the HW features that resulted, and how software engineers have exploiting these features in ways we expected and ways we didn't. The industry has seen this approach used in the acceleration of linear algebra and computer graphics, and in this talk we'll see how we apply similar techniques to data processing but with changes to match the lower compute density of the problem space.
About the speaker
Garret Swart works at Oracle designing new products and capabilities for Database, Cloud, Big Data, Java and SPARC systems. He manages a small advanced development team that works with the product teams to prepare new technologies for incorporation into Oracle's products. Recent summer student projects include lock-free multi-master fault-tolerant transactional hash tables, adaptive compression for memory-speed decompressors, ROI driven adaptive sampling for load balancing, SIMD optimized arbitrary precision arithmetic, and HW-aware optimization strategies for large-to-large hash joins.
Previously, Garret was a researcher at IBM Almaden, developing technology underlying IBM's BLU and Pure Scale products, taught and researched database and storage systems at University College Cork, led start-ups developing ERP for service companies and interactive television for couch potatoes, designed parallel image processing systems at Xerox and distributed operating systems at DEC Systems Research Center where he lead the POSIX pthread standard. His has a PhD from the University of Washington in computational geometry and an BSc from Brown University.
Organised by: Eric Grancher and Miguel Angel Marquina - IT Department
CERN Computing Seminars and Colloquia