Introduction to the Arm Neoverse N and V series: Cloud-to-Edge Infrastructure SoCs

Andrea Pellegrini (Arm)

In this talk I will present the Neoverse IP roadmap, detailing some of the characteristics of our IPs that make them a great choice for developing high performance SoCs from power-constrained edge appliances all the way up to systems targeting HPC and cloud deployments. Additionally, this talk will touch upon the state of cloud and SW applications, and will provide some pointers to users that want to extract more performance and value from Arm Neoverse instances that are now easily accessible in various cloud environments.

Andrea Pellegrini leads the performance and workloads team for the Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm. Andrea is based in Austin, TX, USA and joined Arm to work on Arm servers in 2016, after spending 3 years at Intel, where he was an architect for IO virtualization. Andrea obtained a PhD in computer architecture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and holds a Master and a Bachelors degree in computer engineering from the Universita' di Bologna, Italy.

Fresh Thinking: New Researchers, Bright Ideas

A series of invited talks by younger researchers, including:

Extend, Not Just Accelerate!

Zsolt István (IT University of Copenhagen)

The hardware in today's datacenters and clouds is changing at a dizzying pace. Heterogeneity, accelerators and disaggregated architectures are becoming commonplace and change the way we design and operate databases. It has never been so easy to add an accelerator to a database but, in this talk, I will make the case that there is an alternative approach to be considered. Instead of building yet another analytics accelerator, we should use specialized hardware to offer new functionality in databases; functionality that makes them more secure, private and reliable! By using specialized hardware, the cost of such new functionality could be hidden, making future databases just as fast as today's while offering added benefits.

Zsolt István is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Before that, he was an Assistant Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid. Zsolt works in the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and FPGA programming. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Cloud-native databases: opportunities and challenges

Xiangyao Yu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Organizations are moving their databases to the cloud due to lower cost, elastic resource allocation, availability, etc. Cloud brings unique opportunities and challenges that are unprecedented in conventional databases, which require us to revisit the software and hardware stacks of a DBMS to fully exploit the performance and cost potential.

This talks focuses on a particular architectural feature of cloud-native databases — storage disaggregation, where computation and storage are independently managed and connected through the network. Disaggregation enables independent scaling of resources, but incurs long latency and bandwidth bottlenecks for IO since the storage is remote. I will share our recent papers (choosing cloud-DBMS [VLDB'19], pushdownDB [ICDE'20], and FlexPushdownDB [VLDB'21]) addressing these challenges. I will also share my thoughts on the potential research questions and solutions in this domain.

Xiangyao Yu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include (1) transactions and HTAP, (2) new hardware for databases, and (3) cloud-native databases. Before joining UW-Madison, he finished his postdoc (2019) and PhD (2017) at MIT and his bachelor degree (2012) at Tsinghua University.