P-MOSS: Scheduling Main-Memory Indexes Over NUMA Servers Using Next Token Prediction

TL;DR

P-MOSS is a novel learned scheduling framework that optimizes query execution placement on NUMA servers by leveraging hardware statistics and techniques inspired by large language models, significantly improving database performance.

Contribution

It introduces a learned, hardware-aware scheduling method for DBMS queries on NUMA architectures using next token prediction techniques from language models.

Findings

Up to 6x increase in query throughput with P-MOSS.

Effective adaptation to cross-hardware and workload variations.

Improved data locality and core utilization.

Abstract

Ever since the Dennard scaling broke down in the early 2000s and the frequency of the CPUs stalled, vendors have started to increase the core count in each CPU chip at the expense of introducing heterogeneity, thus ushering the era of NUMA and Chiplet processors. Since then, the heterogeneity in the design space of hardware has only increased to the point that DBMS performance may vary significantly up to an order of magnitude in modern servers. An important factor that affects performance includes the location of the logical cores where the DBMS queries execute, and the location where the data resides. This paper introduces P-MOSS, a learned spatial scheduling framework that schedules query execution to specific logical cores, and co-locates data on the corresponding NUMA node. For cross-hardware and workload adaptability, P-MOSS leverages core principles from Large Language Models, such as Next Token prediction, Generative Pre-training, and Fine-tuning. In the spirit of hardware-software synergy, P-MOSS guides its scheduling decision solely based on the low-level hardware statistics collected from the hardware Performance Monitoring Unit with the aid of a Decision Transformer. Experimental evaluation is performed in the context of the B$^+$-Tree index. Performance results demonstrate that P-MOSS offers an improvement of up to $6\times$ over traditional schedules in terms of query throughput.