GPU-Accelerated OLTP: An in-Depth Analysis of Concurrency Control Schemes

Over the past decade, GPUs have demonstrated significant potential in accelerating Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) operations. However, there remains a substantial gap in their application to Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), as GPUs were traditionally considered unsuitable for such workloads. Despite this perception, the massive parallelism and high memory bandwidth of GPUs offer a unique opportunity to process thousands of transactions concurrently, making them promising candidates for OLTP acceleration. Concurrency control schemes, which play a critical role in determining the performance of OLTP systems, may behave differently on GPUs due to their architectural differences from CPUs. This raises a key question: How well do concurrency control schemes designed for CPUs adapt to GPU environments? To answer this, we present gCCTB, the first testbed designed to evaluate concurrency control schemes on GPUs. We implement and benchmark eight CC schemes, including six classic CPU-oriented schemes and two designed specifically for GPUs, on both the YCSB and TPC-C benchmarks under varied contention levels and GPU configurations. Our findings reveal that GPU-optimized schemes do not consistently outperform CPU-oriented schemes, particularly under specific workloads and contention levels. Moreover, GPU-specific parameters, such as the number of threads per warp and warps per block, significantly impact performance and require careful tuning. Finally, we find that conflict resolution overhead is a crucial factor influencing the performance of CPU-oriented schemes on GPUs, with optimistic concurrency control consistently minimizing this overhead and outperforming other CPU-oriented schemes across all workloads.