Oracle Unleashes New Innovations in Data Analytics With Free and Open Interfaces to On-Chip Accelerators - Seite 2

As one notable example of Data Analytics Accelerator integration into machine learning and Big Data use cases, Oracle engineers have shown that the DAX can significantly accelerate Apache Spark, which has become one of the most popular methods for processing large data sets. Through this project, engineers used the DAX with Apache Spark to take one billion rows of data in memory and filter it into a 3D cube so fast that interactive data analytics are now possible.

SPARC M7 and DAX design advantages include:

• Industry-leading delivered memory bandwidth: at an industry-leading 160GB/s memory bandwidth, the SPARC M7 processor provides enough capacity to feed both the DAX units as well as processor cores.
  
  
• DAX offload: frees the processor cores for other processing.
  
  
• Efficient decompressing combined with in-memory processing: putting decompression in the DAX unit is much faster than software implementations. Designing decompression with scanning means needless back and forth memory transfers are avoided. Results from the DAX are entered into the CPU cache for better CPU efficiency.
  
  
• DAX range comparisons: many real-world database analytics queries are written to find data transacted between certain dates, or product cost ranges, etc. The DAX processes range comparisons at the same rate as individual comparisons. Other processors require additional computational time for each comparison.
  
  
• Avoiding cache pollution: the DAX does much of its computation without needing to store intermediate data in a cache, freeing the CPU's cache for other processing.
  
  

Partnerships with Developer Community and Leading Higher Education Institutions
Oracle continues to deliver traditional processor enhancements to improve performance of traditional workloads with more than 20 world record results over the competition. Software in Silicon can deliver previously unattainable step function improvements required in areas such as security and data analytics by embedding the functionalities to handle particular algorithms on the processor with greater performance and efficiency.

Oracle has also published several use cases with code samples to maximize developer productivity and expedite projects as well as a detailed example of DAX integration with Apache Spark. Resources can be accessed now via the Oracle Software in Silicon Cloud, a freely available cloud service for developers and researchers that provides direct access to this technology. Additionally, Oracle is partnering with leading higher education institutions such as Brown University, on innovative research projects with Software in Silicon.