Lecture

StagedDB/CMP: Service-based Data Management
for High Parallelism and Sharing

Speaker:	Natassa Ailamaki, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Date:	Friday, 13 April 2007
Time:	12:00-13:30
Location:	"Mediterranean Studies" Seminar Room, FORTH. Heraklion, Crete
Hosts:	V. Christophides, D. Plexousakis

Abstract:

With current chip multiprocessor technology trends, the need for unlimited software parallelism and memory hierarchy affinity has become more imminent than ever before. As the hardware componentization continues, failure to create aggressively parallel software will reduce the need for faster hardware, which will have huge economic and social consequences. Database management systems (DBMS), due to their intensive data processing nature, are in the front line of commercial applications unable to harness the available computing power. To prevent the CPUs from idling, a multitude of hardware mechanisms and software optimizations have been proposed. Their effectiveness, however, is limited by the sheer volume of data accessed, the unpredictable sequence of memory requests, and the inherent single-threaded nature of DBMS software. In this talk I describe the current state of affairs in computer architecture trends and demonstrate the need for a new programming paradigm for commercial server software. I also present StagedDB/CMP, a new DBMS software architecture for optimizing data and instruction locality at all levels of the memory hierarchy. The key idea is to break database request execution into independent services (stages), and process a group of sub-requests at each stage, thus effortlessly exploiting data, instruction, and work sharing. By translating high concurrency into improved locality and by providing fine-grain operation-level parallelism, the StagedDB architecture is an ideal match to future highly-parallel infrastructures. Finally, if there is enough time, I will briefly survey the rest of my research interests in the area of storage technology and data management for scientific applications such as astronomy and earthquake modeling.

Bio:

Anastasia (Natassa) Ailamaki received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the University of Patra, Greece, M.Sc. degrees from the Technical University of Crete, Greece and from the University of Rochester, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2001, she joined the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests are in the broad area of database systems and applications, with emphasis on database system behavior on modern processor hardware and disks. Her projects at Carnegie Mellon (including Staged Database Systems, Cache-Resident Data Bases, and the Fates Storage Manager), aim at building systems to strengthen the interaction between the database software and the underlying hardware and I/O devices. In addition, she is working on automated schema design and computational database support for scientific applications, storage device modeling and performance prediction, as well as internet query caching. Natassa has received a Sloan Research Fellowship (2005), six best-paper awards (VLDB 2001, Performance 2002, VLDB PhD Workshop 2003, ICDE 2004, FAST 2005, and ICDE 2006 (demo)), an NSF CAREER award (2002), and IBM Faculty Partnership awards in 2001, 2002, and 2003. She is a member of IEEE and ACM, and has also been a CRA-W mentor.

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