WOW: what the world of (data) warehousing can learn from the World of Warcraft

Abstract

Although originally designed to accelerate pixel monsters, graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been used for some time as accelerators for selected data base operations. However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has yet reported building a complete system that allows executing complex analytics queries, much less an entire data warehouse benchmark at realistic scale. In this demo, we showcase such a complete system prototype running on a high-end GPU paired with an IBM storage system that achieves >90% hardware efficiency. Our solution delivers sustainable high throughput for business analytics queries in a realistic scenario, i.e., the Star Schema Benchmark at scale factor 1,000. Attendees can interact with our system through a graphical user interface on a tablet PC. They will be able to experience first hand how queries that require processing more than six billion rows, or 100 GB of data, are answered in less than 20 seconds. The user interface allows submitting queries, live performance monitoring of the current query all the way down to the operator level, and viewing the result once the query completes.