Parallel H-Tree Based Data Cubing on Graphics Processors

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have a SIMD architecture and have been widely used recently as powerful generalpurpose co-processors for the CPU. In this paper, we investigate efficient GPU-based data cubing because the most frequent operation in data cube computation is aggregation, which is an expensive operation well suited for SIMD parallel processors. H-tree is a hyper-linked tree structure used in both top-k H-cubing [21] and the stream cube [20]. Fast H-tree construction, update and real-time query response are crucial in many OLAP applications. We design highly efficient GPU-based parallel algorithms for these H-tree based data cube operations. This has been made possible by taking effective methods, such as parallel primitives for segmented data and efficient memory access patterns, to achieve load balance on the GPU while hiding memory access latency. As a result, our GPU algorithms can often achieve more than an order of magnitude speedup when compared with their sequential counterparts on a single CPU. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop parallel data cubing algorithms on graphics processors.