Quickstep

Quickstep is a next-generation relational data processing kernel that is being developed in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin. Quickstep aims to deliver efficient and sustainable data processing performance on current and future hardware by using a hardware-software co-design philosophy.

For the hardware available today, this means effectively exploiting large main memories, fast on-die CPU caches, highly parallel multi-core CPUs, and NVRAM storage technologies.

For the hardware available in the future, we aim to co-design hardware and software primitives that will allow data processing kernels to work on increasing amounts of data economically -- both from the raw performance perspective, and from the perspective of the energy consumed by data processing kernels.

Quickstep is now an Apache (incubating) open-source project! You can find the code here, and the main ASF website is here.

Team (current)

• Harshad Deshmukh
• Hakan Memisoglu
• Udip Pant
• Navneet Potti
• Adalbert G. Soosai Raj
• Saket Saurabh
• Siddharth Suresh
• Marc Spehlmann
• Zuyu Zhang
• Jianqiao Zhu
• Jignesh M. Patel

Alums

• Shoban Chandrabose
• Craig Chasseur
• Anusha Dasarakothapalli
• Jing Fan
• Yinan Li
• James Paton
• Sangmin Shin
• Qiang Zeng

Publications and Software

• The case against specialized graph analytics engines, J. Fan, G. Soosai Raj, and J. M. Patel. CIDR 2015. Slides.

• QuickFOIL: Scalable Inductive Logic Programming, Q. Zeng, J. M. Patel, and D. Page. VLDB 2015.

• Profiling R on a Contemporary Processor, S. Sridharan and J. M. Patel, VLDB 2015 (to appear). Extended paper.
  Download code and scripts.

• WideTable: An Accelerator for Analytical Data Processing, Y. Li and J. M. Patel, VLDB 2014. blog.

• Design and Evaluation of Storage Organizations For Read-Optimized Main-Memory Databases, C. Chasseur and J. M. Patel, VLDB 2014.
  Download v0.1 of the Quickstep Storage Manager, released under license; start with the README file.

• BitWeaving: Fast Scans for Main Memory Data Processing, Y. Li and J. M. Patel, SIGMOD 2013.

• Enabling JSON Document Stores in Relational Systems, C. Chasseur, Y. Li, and J. M. Patel, WebDB 2013.
  Download the Argo mapping layer. Download the NoBench benchmark.

Support

Quickstep is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0963993 and IIS-1250886.