Bloom Filter-Based Parallel Architecture for Accelerating Equi-Join Operation on FPGA

As one of the most important operations in relational databases, the join is data-intensive and time-consuming. Thus, offloading this operation using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has attracted much interest and has been broadly researched in recent years. However, the available SRAM-based join architectures are often resource-intensive, power-consuming, or low-throughput. Besides, a lower match rate does not lead to a shorter operation time. To address these issues, a Bloom filter (BF)-based parallel join architecture is presented in this paper. This architecture first leverages the BF to discard the tuples that are not in the join result and classifies the remaining tuples into different channels. Second, a binary search tree is used to reduce the number of comparisons. The proposed method was implemented on a Xilinx FPGA, and the experimental results show that under a match rate of 50%, our architecture achieved a high join throughput of 145.8 million tuples per second and a maximum acceleration factor of 2.3 compared to the existing SRAM-based join architectures.