SustainSys Seminar Series – Ecological Efficiency in Database Servers
Tilmann Rabl - Professor for Data Engineering Systems, Digital Engineering Fakultät, University of Potsdam, Hasso Plattner Institute
May 13, 2025, 9:30 a.m. - May 13, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
Online
For a long time, acquiring new hardware resulted in significant software efficiency gains due to exponential improvements of hardware capabilities. Physical limits in hardware manufacturing have brought former niche designs into standard components, such as multiple cores and specialized circuits. Even with these new designs, hardware improvements are decreasing, while software and applications are still becoming increasingly complex and resource demanding. This trend is pronounced for database systems, which are not the major target for current hardware optimizations.
In this talk, we will present current hardware and cloud trends and their ecological impact. We will introduce ecological efficiency of database system deployments and discuss their implications on database system design. We will look at our research on the design of efficient software architectures and give an outlook on our vision of holistically optimizing the ecological efficiency of database deployments.
Tilmann Rabl is a professor for database systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on data processing and management in large scale systems, on modern hardware, and in streaming applications. Besides efficiency improvements, he is interested in making systems and applications friendlier for the environment and society in general.
