Offloading Bloom Filter Operations to Network Processor for Parallel Query Processing in Cluster of Workstations

Abstract. Workstation clusters have high performance interconnects with programmable network processors, which facilitate interesting opportunities to offload certain application specific computation on them and hence enhance the performance of the parallel application. Our earlier work in this direction achieves enhanced performance and balanced utilization of resources by exploiting the programmable features of the network interface in parallel database query execution. In this paper, we extend our earlier work for studying parallel query execution with Bloom filters. We propose and evaluate a scheme to offload the Bloom filter operations to the network processor. Further we explore offloading certain tuple processing activities on to the network processor by adopting a network interface attached disk scheme. The above schemes yield a speedup of up to 1.13 over the base scheme with Bloom filter where all processing is done by the host processor and achieve balanced utilization of resources. In the presence of a disk buffer cache, which reduces both the disk and I/O traffic, offloading schemes improve the speedup to 1.24.