The multi-core trend in CPUs and general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) offers new opportunities for the database community. The increase of cores at exponential rates is likely to affect virtually every server and client in the coming decade, and presents database management systems with a huge, compelling disruption that will radically change how processing is done. This paper presents a new parallel indexing data structure for answering queries that takes full advantage of the increasing thread-level parallelism emerging in multi-core architectures. In our approach, our Data Parallel Bin-based Index Strategy (DP-BIS) first bins the base data, and then partitions and stores the values in each bin as a separate, bin-based data cluster. In answering a query, the procedures for examining the bin numbers and the bin-based data clusters offer the maximum possible level of concurrency; each record is evaluated by a single thread and all threads are processed simultaneously in parallel. We implement and demonstrate the effectiveness of DP-BIS on two multi-core architectures: a multi-core CPU and a GPU. The concurrency afforded by DP-BIS allows us to fully utilize the thread-level parallelism provided by each architecture--for example, our GPU-based DP-BIS implementation simultaneously evaluates over 12,000 records with an equivalent number of concurrently executing threads. In comparing DP-BIS's performance across these architectures, we show that the GPU-based DP-BIS implementation requires significantly less computation time to answer a query than the CPU-based implementation. We also demonstrate in our analysis that DP-BIS provides better overall performance than the commonly utilized CPU and GPU-based projection index. Finally, due to data encoding, we show that DP-BIS accesses significantly smaller amounts of data than index strategies that operate solely on a column's base data; this smaller data footprint is critical for parallel processors that possess limited memory resources (e.g., GPUs).

This paper presents a new parallel indexing data structure for answering queries. The index, called Bin-Hash, offers extremely high levels of concurrency, and is therefore well-suited for the emerging commodity of parallel processors, such as multi-cores, cell processors, and general purpose graphics processing units (GPU). The Bin-Hash approach first bins the base data, and then partitions and separately stores the values in each bin as a perfect spatial hash table. To answer a query, we first determine whether or not a record satisfies the query conditions based on the bin boundaries. For the bins with records that can not be resolved, we examine the spatial hash tables. The procedures for examining the bin numbers and the spatial hash tables offer the maximum possible level of concurrency; all records are able to be evaluated by our procedure independently in parallel. Additionally, our Bin-Hash procedures access much smaller amounts of data than similar parallel methods, such as the projection index. This smaller data footprint is critical for certain parallel processors, like GPUs, where memory resources are limited. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Bin-Hash, we implement it on a GPU using the data-parallel programming language CUDA. The concurrency offered by the Bin-Hash index allows us to fully utilize the GPU's massive parallelism in our work; over 12,000 records can be simultaneously evaluated at any one time. We show that our new query processing method is an order of magnitude faster than current state-of-the-art CPU-based indexing technologies. Additionally, we compare our performance to existing GPU-based projection index strategies.

Abstract?Driven by the ability to generate ever-larger, increasingly complex data, there is an urgent need in the scientific community for scalable analysis methods that can rapidly identify salient trends in scientific data. Query-Driven Visualization (QDV) strategies are among the small subset of techniques that can address both large and highly complex datasets. This paper extends the utility of QDV strategies with a statistics-based framework that integrates non-parametric distribution estimation techniques with a new segmentation strategy to visually identify statistically significant trends and features within the solution space of a query. In this framework, query distribution estimates help users to interactively explore their query's solution and visually identify the regions where the combined behavior of constrained variables is most important, statistically, to their inquiry. Our new segmentation strategy extends the distribution estimation analysis by visually conveying the individual importance of each variable to these regions of high statistical significance. We demonstrate the analysis benefits these two strategies provide and show how they may be used to facilitate the refinement of constraints over variables expressed in a user's query. We apply our method to datasets from two different scientific domains to demonstrate its broad applicability.

The visualization and analysis of AMR-based simulations is integral to the process of obtaining new insight in scientific research. We present a new method for performing query-driven visualization and analysis on AMR data, with specific emphasis on time-varying AMR data. Our work introduces a new method that directly addresses the dynamic spatial and temporal properties of AMR grids which challenge many existing visualization techniques. Further, we present the first implementation of query-driven visualization on the GPU that uses a GPU-based indexing structure to both answer queries and efficiently utilize GPU memory. We apply our method to two different science domains to demonstrate its broad applicability.

Large scale scientific data is often stored in scientific data formats such as FITS, netCDF and HDF. These storage formats are of particular interest to the scientific user community since they provide multi-dimensional storage and retrieval. However, one of the drawbacks of these storage formats is that they do not support semantic indexing which is important for interactive data analysis where scientists look for features of interests such as "Find all supernova explosions where energy > 105 and temperature > 106". In this paper we present a novel approach called HDF5-FastQuery to accelerate the data access of large HDF5 files by introducing multi-dimensional semantic indexing. Our implementation leverages an efficient indexing technology called "bitmap indexing" that has been widely used in the database community. Bitmap indices are especially well suited for interactive exploration of large-scale read-only data. Storing the bitmap indices into the HDF5 file has the following advantages: a) Significant performance speedup of accessing subsets of multi-dimensional data and b) portability of the indices across multiple computer platforms. We will present an API that simplifies the execution of queries on HDF5 files for general scientific applications and data analysis. The design is flexible enough to accommodate the use of arbitrary indexing technology for semantic range queries. We will also provide a detailed performance analysis of HDF5-FastQuery for both synthetic and scientific data. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach for multi-dimensional queries is up to a factor of 2 faster than HDF5.