Main-memory scan sharing for multi-core CPUs

Computer architectures are increasingly based on multi-core CPUs and large memories. Memory bandwidth, which has not kept pace with the increasing number of cores, has become the primary processing bottleneck, replacing disk I/O as the limiting factor. To address this challenge, we provide novel algorithms for increasing the throughput of Business Intelligence (BI) queries, as well as for ensuring fairness and avoiding starvation among a concurrent set of such queries. To maximize throughput, we propose a novel FullSharing scheme that allows all concurrent queries, when performing base-table I/O, to share the cache belonging to a given core. We then generalize this approach to a BatchSharing scheme that avoids thrashing on "agg-tables"-hash tables that are used for aggregation processing-caused by execution of too many queries on a core. This scheme partitions queries into batches such that the working-set of agg-table entries for each batch can fit into a cache; an efficient sampling technique is used to estimate selectivities and working-set sizes for purposes of query partitioning. Finally, we use lottery-scheduling techniques to ensure fairness and impose a hard upper bound on staging time to avoid starvation. On our 8-core testbed, we were able to completely remove the memory I/O bottleneck, increasing throughput by a factor of 2 to 2.5, while also maintaining fairness and avoiding starvation. © 2008 VLDB Endowment.