Compression-Aware GPU Buffer Management

Abstract

Hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) connected via PCIe, provide their own byte-addressable device memory. When integrating their memory into the global buffer pool, database systems should place compressed data and the associated operators on the best suited units to maximise overall throughput and bandwidth. This paper presents a three-tier buffer manager that manages encoded pages across SSD, RAM and GPU device memory while codec-specific operators fuse decompression, selection, join and aggregation. Splitting the workload between CPU (uncompressed in RAM) and GPU (compressed on device) and combining partial aggregates yields a throughput of 3.76 GiB/s, which is 15% higher than GPU-only execution. The results are the basis for a cost-model for data and operator placement.