René Müller, Jens Teubner, Gustavo Alonso. Glacier: a query-to-hardware compiler. In Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Divyakant Agrawal, editors, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2010, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, June 6-10, 2010. pages 1159-1162, ACM, 2010. [doi]
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a promising technology that can be used in database systems. In this demonstration we show Glacier, a library and a compiler that can be employed to implement streaming queries as hardware circuits on FPGAs. Glacier consists of a library of compositional hardware modules that represent stream processing operators. Given a query execution plan, the compiler instantiates the corresponding components and wires them up to a digital circuit. The goal of this demo is to show the flexibility of the compositional approach.