Towards Database / Operating System Co-Design

Trends in multicore processors pose serious structural challenges to system software such as databases and operating systems. In this paper we revisit the decades-old problem of the interaction be-tween a database and an operating system in the new context of the changes imposed on both by multicore architectures. Using existing prototypes of a multicore database and multicore operat-ing system, we explore how they can efficiently interact so that the database can make optimal placement and deployment decisions without knowledge of the machine architecture. On diverse hard-ware, our results show superior memory and interconnect utiliza-tion, and dramatic performance improvements in the presence of competing system tasks. 1