A Study of Main-Memory Hash Joins on Many-core Processor

Advanced processor architectures have been driving new designs, implementations and optimizations of main-memory hash join algorithms recently. The newly released Intel Xeon Phi many-core processor of the Knights Landing architecture (KNL) embraces interesting hardware features such as many low-frequency out-of-order cores connected on a 2D mesh, and high-bandwidth multi-channel memory (MCDRAM). In this paper, we experimentally revisit the state-of-the-art main-memory hash join algorithms to study how the new hardware features of KNL affect the algorithmic design and tuning as well as to identify the opportunities for further performance improvement on KNL. Our experiments show that, although many existing optimizations are still valid on KNL with proper tuning, even the state-of-the-art algorithms have severely underutilized the memory bandwidth and other hardware resources.