SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware

TL;DR

SwiftSpatial is an FPGA-based accelerator that significantly speeds up spatial join queries, reducing latency and power consumption compared to CPU and GPU systems, suitable for data centers and edge devices.

Contribution

The paper introduces SwiftSpatial, a novel FPGA-based hardware accelerator optimized for spatial joins, with innovative parallelism and memory management techniques.

Findings

Up to 41.03x latency reduction compared to CPU/GPU systems.

Requires 6.16x less power than baseline systems.

Effective in data centers and mobile devices with FPGA capabilities.

Abstract

Spatial joins are among the most time-consuming spatial queries, remaining costly even in parallel and distributed systems. In this paper, we explore hardware acceleration for spatial joins by proposing SwiftSpatial, an FPGA-based accelerator that can be deployed in data centers and at the edge. SwiftSpatial contains multiple high-performance join units with innovative hybrid parallelism, several efficient memory management units, and an extensible on-chip join scheduler that supports the popular R-tree synchronous traversal and partition-based spatial-merge (PBSM) algorithms. Benchmarked against various CPU and GPU-based spatial data processing systems, SwiftSpatial demonstrates a latency reduction of up to 41.03x relative to the best-performing baseline, while requiring 6.16x less power. The performance and energy efficiency of SwiftSpatial demonstrate its potential to be used in a variety of configurations (e.g., as an accelerator, near storage, in-network) as well as on different devices (e.g., data centers where FPGAs are widely available or mobile devices, which also contain FPGAs for specialized processing).