ZipFlow: a Compiler-based Framework to Unleash Compressed Data Movement for Modern GPUs

TL;DR

ZipFlow is a compiler-based framework that optimizes compressed data transfer and decompression on GPUs, significantly improving data transfer performance in GPU-accelerated data analytics by classifying compression algorithms and exploiting GPU parallelism.

Contribution

It introduces a holistic, pattern-based approach to optimize compressed data movement on GPUs, advancing end-to-end query performance.

Findings

Achieves 2.08x speedup over nvCOMP

Attains 3.14x faster than CPU-based engines

Effectively exploits GPU parallelism across architectures

Abstract

In GPU-accelerated data analytics, the overhead of data transfer from CPU to GPU becomes a performance bottleneck when the data scales beyond GPU memory capacity due to the limited PCIe bandwidth. Data compression has come to rescue for reducing the amount of data transfer while taking advantage of the powerful GPU computation for decompression. To optimize the end-to-end query performance, however, the workflow of data compression, transfer, and decompression must be holistically designed based on the compression strategies and hardware characteristics to balance the I/O latency and computational overhead. In this work, we present ZipFlow, a compiler-based framework for optimizing compressed data transfer in GPU-accelerated data analytics. ZipFlow classifies compression algorithms into three distinct patterns based on their inherent parallelism. For each pattern, ZipFlow employs generalized scheduling strategies to effectively exploit the computational power of GPUs across diverse architectures. Building on these patterns, ZipFlow delivers flexible, high-performance, and holistic optimization, which substantially advances end-to-end data transfer capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness of ZipFlow on industry-standard benchmark, TPC-H. Overall, ZipFlow achieves an average improvement of 2.08 times over the state-of-the-art GPU compression library (nvCOMP) and 3.14 times speedup against CPU-based query processing engines (e.g., DuckDB).