Master of None Acceleration: A Comparison of Accelerator Architectures for Analytical Query Processing

Hardware accelerators are one promising solution to contend with the end of Dennard scaling and the slowdown of Moore's law. For mature workloads that are regular and have high compute per byte, hardening an application into one or more hardware modules is a standard approach. However, for some applications, we find that a programmable homogeneous architecture is preferable. This paper compares a previously proposed heterogeneous hardware accelerator for analytical query processing to a homogeneous systolic array alternative. We find that the heterogeneous and homogeneous accelerators are equivalent for large designs, while for small designs the homogeneous is better. Our analysis explains this counter-intuitive result, finding that the homogeneous architecture has higher average resource utilization and lower relative costs for the communication infrastructure.