Processing elements of a hardware accelerated reconfigurable processor for accelerating database operations and queries

摘要

Embodiments of the present invention provide processing elements that are capable of performing high level database operations in hardware based on machine code instructions. These processing elements employ a dataflow architecture that operates on data in hardware without interruption or software. A scanning/indexing processing element may comprise logic that analyze database column groups stored in local memory, perform parallel field extraction and comparison, and generates a list of row pointers (row ids or RIDs) referencing those rows whose value(s) satisfy an applied predicate. The scanning/indexing processing may also be used to project database column groups, search and join index structures, and manipulate in-flight metadata flows, composing, merging, reducing, and modifying multi-dimensional lists of intermediate and final results. Furthermore, a scanning/indexing processing element may be used for joins with indexes, like a Group Index, which involves the association of each input tuple with potentially many related data components, in a one-to-many mapping. An XCAM processing element may comprise logic to perform associative database operations, like accumulation and aggregation, sieving, sorting and associative joins.