Improving run-time performance of server-based data processing applications

Whilst hardware capabilities of data centres keeps improving, the software running needs to be able to make use of these new capabilities and meet emerging requirements. This thesis presents research for improving the performance of data centres by making use of the specialised hardware and introducing a software framework to allow the performance to be analysed.<br><br>The first optimisation presented optimises a specific function in some database systems called the delta merge function by providing an field programmable gate array based solution.

Integration in a production database has shown a speedup over 100x for certain cases compared to a central processing unit implementation, and 2x in the worst case.<br><br>In addition to the acceleration of databases, this research focuses on improving the performance of general tasks in data centres by optimising the scheduler. Dynamic binary instrumentation tools allow a program to be intercepted and modified in runtime, but operate at a low level view.