Ibex - An Intelligent Storage Engine with Support for Advanced SQL Off-loading

Modern data appliances face severe bandwidth bottlenecks when moving vast amounts of data from storage to the query processing nodes. A possible solution to mitigate these bottlenecks is query off-loading to an intelligent storage engine, where partial or whole queries are pushed down to the storage engine. In this paper, we present Ibex , a prototype of an intelligent storage engine that supports off-loading of complex query operators. Besides increasing performance, Ibex also reduces energy consumption, as it uses an FPGA rather than conventional CPUs to implement the off-load engine. Ibex is a hybrid engine, with dedicated hardware that evaluates SQL expressions at line-rate and a software fallback for tasks that the hardware engine cannot handle. Ibex supports GROUP BY aggregation, as well as projectionand selectionbased filtering. GROUP BY aggregation has a higher impact on performance but is also a more challenging operator to implement on an FPGA.