Tackling Hardware/Software co-design from a database perspective

Abstract

Hardware is evolving at a very fast pace due to diverse trends in the IT industry. In the area of data processing, it is fair to say that software often just reacts to these changes, trying to accommodate developments that are not always an immediate step forward in terms of either performance or functionality. In this paper we report on two ongoing, longterm projects: Enzian, an experimental hardware platform to explore the design of software systems on future hardware, and doppioDB, a research database engine built to explore how to to co-design hardware and software from a data procesisng perspective. The paper focuses on the possibilities offered by the combination of Enzian+doppioDB in terms of enabling novel data processing systems.