Optimistic Data Parallelism for FPGA-Accelerated Sketching

Sketches are a popular approximation technique for large datasets and high-velocity data streams. While custom FPGA-based hardware has shown admirable throughput at sketching, the state-of-the-art exploits data parallelism by fully replicating resources and constructing independent summaries for every parallel input value. We consider this approach pessimistic, as it guarantees constant processing rates by provisioning resources for the worst case.

We propose a novel optimistic sketching architecture for FPGAs that partitions a single sketch into multiple independent banks shared among all input values, thus significantly reducing resource consumption. However, skewed input data distributions can result in conflicting accesses to banks and impair the processing rate. To mitigate the effect of skew, we add mergers that exploit temporal locality by combining recent updates. Our evaluation shows that an optimistic architecture is feasible and reduces the utilization of critical FPGA resources proportionally to the number of parallel input values. We further show that FPGA accelerators provide up to 2.6 x higher throughput than a recent CPU and GPU, while larger sketch sizes enabled by optimistic architectures improve accuracy by up to an order of magnitude in a realistic sketching application.