Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Hardware development continuously advances, with different technologies improving at different pace. While the amount of transistors in a CPU package are growing, the single core performance is stagnating due to physical limitations. These trends require changes in data processing to keep database management systems efficient. In this lecture, we will take a look at current computer architectures and accelerator technologies and how they can be used for efficient data processing. We will cover CPU and memory architecture; the storage hierarchy; modern memory technolgoies, such as NVM and NVMe; fast interconnects, such as Infiniband, RDMA, and NVLink; and accelerators, such as GPUs and FPGAs. The course has a significant practical part, where the students learn to implement data structures and algorithms tailored to hardware concious data processing.