An Overview of Hawk: A Hardware-Tailored Code Generator for the Heterogeneous Many Core Age

Abstract

Processor manufacturers build increasingly specialized processors to mitigate the effects of the power wall in order to deliver improved performance. Currently, database engines have to be manually optimized for each processor which is a costly and error prone process. In this paper, we provide a summary of our recent VLDB Journal publication, where we propose concepts to adapt to performance enhancements of modern processors and to exploit their capabilities automatically. Our key idea is to create processor-specific code variants and to learn a well-performing code variant for each processor. These code variants leverage various parallelization strategies and apply both generic and processor-specific code transformations. We observe that performance of code variants may diverge up to two orders of magnitude. Thus, we need to generate custom code for each processor for peak performance. Hawk automatically finds efficient code variants for CPUs, GPUs, and MICs.