1.
Benson, L., Papke, L., Rabl, T.: PerMA-Bench: Benchmarking Persistent Memory Access. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. 15, 2463–2476 (2022).
Persistent memory's (PMem) byte-addressability and persistence at DRAM-like speed with SSD-like capacity have the potential to cause a major performance shift in database storage systems. With the availability of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, initial benchmarks evaluate the performance of real PMem hardware. However, these results apply to only a single server and it is not yet clear how workloads compare across different PMem servers. In this paper, we propose PerMA-Bench, a configurable benchmark framework that allows users to evaluate the bandwidth, latency, and operations per second for customizable database-related PMem access. Based on PerMA-Bench, we perform an extensive evaluation of PMem performance across four different server configurations, containing both first- and second-generation Optane, with additional parameters such as DIMM power budget and number of DIMMs per server. We validate our results with existing systems and show the impact of low-level design choices. We conduct a price-performance comparison that shows while there are large differences across Optane DIMMs, PMem is generally competitive with DRAM. We discuss our findings and identify eight general and implementation-specific aspects that influence PMem performance and should be considered in future work to improve PMem-aware designs.
2.
Gévay, G.E., Rabl, T., Breß, S., Madai-Tahy, L., Quiané-Ruiz, J.-A., Markl, V.: Imperative or Functional Control Flow Handling: Why not the Best of Both Worlds?. ACM SIGMOD Record. 51, 1–8 (2022).
Modern data analysis tasks often involve control flow statements, such as the iterations in PageRank and K-means. To achieve scalability, developers usually implement these tasks in distributed dataflow systems, such as Spark and Flink. Designers of such systems have to choose between providing imperative or functional control flow constructs to users. Imperative constructs are easier to use, but functional constructs are easier to compile to an efficient dataflow job. We propose Mitos, a system where control flow is both easy to use and efficient. Mitos relies on an intermediate representation based on the static single assignment form. This allows us to abstract away from specific control flow constructs and treat any imperative control flow uniformly both when building the dataflow job and when coordinating the distributed execution.
3.
Strassenburg, N., Tolovski, I., Rabl, T.: Efficiently Managing Deep Learning Models in a Distributed Environment. 25th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT ’22) (2022).
Deep learning has revolutionized many domains relevant in research and industry, including computer vision and natural language processing by significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art approaches. This is why deep learning models are part of many essential software applications. To guarantee their reliable and consistent performance even in changing environments, they need to be regularly adjusted, improved, and retrained but also documented, deployed, and monitored. An essential part of this set of processes, referred to as model management, is to save and recover models. To enable debugging, many applications require an exact model representation. In this paper, we investigate if, and to what extend, we can outperform a baseline approach capable of saving and recovering models, while focusing on storage consumption, time-to-save, and time-to-recover. We present our Python library MMlib, offering three approaches: a baseline approach that saves complete model snapshots, a parameter update approach that saves the updated model data, and a model provenance approach that saves the model’s provenance instead of the model itself. We evaluate all approaches in four distributed environments on different model architectures, model relations, and data sets. Our evaluation shows that both the model provenance and parameter update approach outperform the baseline by up to 15.8% and 51.7% in time-to-save and by up to 70.0% and 95.6% in storage consumption, respectively.
4.
Maltenberger, T., Lehmann, T., Benson, L., Rabl, T.: Evaluating In-Memory Hash-Joins on Persistent Memory. 25th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT ’22) (2022).
Steady advances in processor and memory technologies have driven continuous tuning and redesigning of in-memory hash-joins for decades. Over the years, research has shown advantages of both hardware-conscious radix-joins and hardware-oblivious joins, without a clear winner. In this paper, we evaluate them on persistent memory (PMem) as an emerging memory technology that offers close-to-DRAM speed while offering significantly higher capacity. We evaluate the no partitioning join (NPO) and the parallel radix join (PRO) on PMem and show how their performance differs from DRAM-based execution. Our results show that while PRO is always at least as fast as NPO in DRAM, this does not hold for PMem, where NPO outperforms PRO by up to 1.7x. Based on our findings, we provide an outlook into key design choices for future PMem-optimized join implementations.
5.
Lutz, C., Breß, S., Zeuch, S., Rabl, T., Markl, V.: Triton Join: Efficiently Scaling the Operator State on GPUs with Fast Interconnects. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’22) (2022).
Database management systems are facing growing data volumes. Previous research suggests that GPUs are well-equipped to quickly process joins and similar stateful operators, as GPUs feature high-bandwidth on-board memory. However, GPUs cannot scale joins to large data volumes due to two limiting factors: (1) large state does not fit into the on-board memory, and (2) spilling state to main memory is constrained by the interconnect bandwidth. Thus, CPUs are often the better choice for scalable data processing. In this paper, we propose a new join algorithm that scales to large data volumes by taking advantage of fast interconnects. Fast interconnects such as NVLink 2.0 are a new technology that connect the GPU to main memory at a high bandwidth, and thus enable us to design our join to efficiently spill its state. Our evaluation shows that our Triton join outperforms a no-partitioning hash join by more than 100× on the same GPU, and a radix-partitioned join on the CPU by up to 2.5×. As a result, GPU-enabled DBMSs are able to scale beyond the GPU memory capacity.
6.
Del Monte, B., Zeuch, S., Rabl, T., Markl, V.: Rethinking Stateful Stream Processing with RDMA. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’22) (2022).
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) hardware has bridged the gap between network and main memory speed and thus invalidated the common assumption that network is often the bottleneck in distributed data processing systems. However, high-speed networks do not provide "plug-and-play" performance (e.g., using IP-overInfiniBand) and require a careful co-design of system and application logic. As a result, system designers need to rethink the architecture of their data management systems to benefit from RDMA acceleration. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration of stream processing engines, which is challenged by real-time constraints and state consistency guarantees. To this end, we propose Slash, a novel stream processing engine that uses high-speed networks and RDMA to efficiently execute distributed streaming computations. Slash embraces a processing model suited for RDMA acceleration and scales out by omitting the expensive data re-partitioning demands of scale-out SPEs. While scale-out SPEs rely on data re-partitioning to execute a query over many nodes, Slash uses RDMA to share mutable state among nodes. Overall, Slash achieves a throughput improvement up to two orders of magnitude over existing systems deployed on an InfiniBand network. Furthermore, it is up to a factor of 22 faster than a self-developed solution that relies on RDMA-based data repartitioning to scale out query processing.
7.
Maltenberger, T., Ilic, I., Tolovski, I., Rabl, T.: Evaluating Multi-GPU Sorting with Modern Interconnects. 2022 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’22) (2022).
In recent years, GPUs have become a mainstream accelerator for database operations such as sorting. Most of the published GPU- based sorting algorithms are single-GPU approaches. Consequently, they neither harness the full computational power nor exploit the high-bandwidth P2P interconnects of modern multi-GPU platforms. In particular, the latest NVLink 2.0 and NVLink 3.0-based NVSwitch interconnects promise unparalleled multi-GPU acceleration. Re- garding multi-GPU sorting, there are two types of algorithms: GPU- only approaches, utilizing P2P interconnects, and heterogeneous strategies that employ the CPU and the GPUs. So far, both types have been evaluated at a time when PCIe 3.0 was state-of-the-art. In this paper, we conduct an extensive analysis of serial, parallel, and bidirectional data transfer rates to, from, and between multiple GPUs on systems with PCIe 3.0, PCIe 4.0, NVLink 2.0, and NVLink 3.0-based NVSwitch interconnects. We measure up to 35.3× higher parallel P2P copy throughput with NVLink 3.0-powered NVSwitch over PCIe 3.0 interconnects. To study multi-GPU sorting on today’s hardware, we implement a P2P-based (P2P sort) and a heteroge- neous (HET sort) multi-GPU sorting algorithm and evaluate them on three modern systems. We observe speedups over state-of-the- art parallel CPU-based radix sort of up to 14× for P2P sort and 9× for HET sort. On systems with high-speed P2P interconnects, we demonstrate that P2P sort outperforms HET sort by up to 1.65×. Finally, we show that overlapping GPU copy and compute opera- tions to mitigate the transfer bottleneck does not yield performance improvements on modern multi-GPU platforms.
8.
Damme, P., Birkenbach, M., Bitsakos, C., Boehm, M., Bonnet, P., Ciorba, F., Dokter, M., Dowgiallo, P., Eleliemy, A., Faerber, C., Goumas, G., Habich, D., Hedam, N., Hofer, M., Huang, W., Innerebner, K., Karakostas, V., Kern, R., Kosar, T., Krause, A., Krems, D., Laber, A., Lehner, W., Mier, E., Rabl, T., Ratuszniak, P., Silva, P., Skuppin, N., Starzacher, A., Steinwender, B., Tolovski, I., Tözün, P., Ulatowski, W., Wang, Y., Wrosz, I., Zamuda, A., Zhang, C., Xiang Zhu, X.: DAPHNE: An Open and Extensible System Infrastructure for Integrated Data Analysis Pipelines. 12th Annual Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR ’22) (2022).
Integrated data analysis (IDA) pipelines—that combine data management (DM) and query processing, high-performance computing (HPC), and machine learning (ML) training and scoring—become increasingly common in practice. Interestingly, systems of these areas share many compilation and runtime techniques, and the used—increasingly heterogeneous—hardware infrastructure converges as well. Yet, the programming paradigms, cluster resource management, data formats and representations, as well as execution strategies differ substantially. DAPHNE is an open and extensible system infrastructure for such IDA pipelines, including language abstractions, compilation and runtime techniques, multi-level scheduling, hardware (HW) accelerators, and computational storage for increasing productivity and eliminating unnecessary overheads. In this paper, we make a case for IDA pipelines, describe the overall DAPHNE system architecture, its key components, and the design of a vectorized execution engine for computational storage, HW accelerators, as well as local and distributed operations. Preliminary experiments that compare DAPHNE with MonetDB, Pandas, DuckDB, and TensorFlow show promising results.
9.
Benson, L., Rabl, T.: Darwin: Scale-In Stream Processing. 12th Annual Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR ’22) (2022).
Companies increasingly rely on stream processing engines (SPEs) to quickly analyze data and monitor infrastructure. These systems enable continuous querying of data at high rates. Current production-level systems, such as Apache Flink and Spark, rely on clusters of servers to scale out processing capacity. Yet, these scale-out systems are resource inefficient and cannot fully utilize the hardware. As a solution, hardware-optimized, single-server, scale-up SPEs were developed. To get the best performance, they neglect essential features for industry adoption, such as larger-than-memory state and recovery. This requires users to choose between high performance or system availability. While some streaming workloads can afford to lose or reprocess large amounts of data, others cannot, forcing them to accept lower performance. Users also face a large performance drop once their workloads slightly exceed a single server and force them to use scale-out SPEs. To acknowledge that real-world stream processing setups have drastically varying performance and availability requirements, we propose scale-in processing. Scale-in processing is a new paradigm that adapts to various application demands by achieving high hardware utilization on a wide range of single- and multi-node hardware setups, reducing overall infrastructure requirements. In contrast to scaling-up or -out, it focuses on fully utilizing the given hardware instead of demanding more or ever-larger servers. We present Darwin, our scale-in SPE prototype that tailors its execution towards arbitrary target environments through compiling stream processing queries while recoverable larger-than-memory state management. Early results show that Darwin achieves an order of magnitude speed-up over current scale-out systems and matches processing rates of scale-up systems.
