An evaluation of concurrency control with one thousand cores

Computer architectures are moving towards an era dominated by many-core machines with dozens or even hundreds of cores on a single chip. This unprecedented level of on-chip parallelism introduces a new dimension to scalability that current database management systems (DBMSs) were not designed for. In particular, as the number of cores increases, the problem of concurrency control becomes extremely challenging. With hundreds of threads running in parallel, the complexity of coordinating competing accesses to data will likely diminish the gains from increased core counts. To better understand just how unprepared current DBMSs are for future CPU architectures, we performed an evaluation of concurrency control for on-line transaction processing (OLTP) workloads on many-core chips. We implemented seven concurrency control algorithms on a main-memory DBMS and using computer simulations scaled our system to 1024 cores. Our analysis shows that all algorithms fail to scale to this magnitude but for different reasons. In each case, we identify fundamental bottlenecks that are independent of the particular database implementation and argue that even state-of-the-art DBMSs suffer from these limitations. We conclude that rather than pursuing incremental solutions, many-core chips may require a completely redesigned DBMS architecture that is built from ground up and is tightly coupled with the hardware.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Yu, Xiangyao

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Srinivas Devadas.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97820

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/97820