JAFAR: Near-Data Processing for Databases

As main-memory sizes have grown, data systems have been able to process entire large-scale data-sets in memory. However, because memory speeds have been not been keeping pace with CPU speeds, the cost of moving data into CPU caches has begun to dominate certain operations within in-memory data systems. Recent advances in hardware architectures point to near memory computation capabilities becoming possible soon. This allows us to rethink how database systems process queries and how they split computation across the various computational units. In this paper, we present JAFAR, a near data processing accelerator for pushing selects down to memory. Through a detailed simulation of JAFAR hardware we show it has the potential to provide up to 900% improvement for select operations in modern column-stores.