Indiana University Bloomington

Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Technical Report TR662:
ParaXML: A Parallel XML Processing Model on the Multicore CPUs

Wei Lu and Dennis Gannon
(Apr 2008), 13 pages pages
Abstract:
XML has emerged as the de facto standard interoperable data format for the web service, the database and document processing systems. The processing of the XML documents, however, has been recognized as the performance bottleneck in those systems; as a result the demand for highperformance XML processing grows rapidly. On the hardware front, the multicore processor is increasingly becoming available on desktop-computing machines with quadcore shipping now and 16 core system within two or three years. Unfortunately almost all of the present XML processing algorithms are still using serial processing model, thus being unable to take advantage of the multicore resource. We believe a parallel XML processing model should be a cost-effective solution for the XML performance issue in the multicore era. In this paper, we present a generalpurpose parallel XML processing model, ParaXML, designed for multicore CPUs. General speaking, ParaXML treats the XML document as the general tree structure and the XML processing task as the extension from the parallel tree traversal algorithm for the classic discrete optmization problems. The XML processing, however, has quite distinct characteristics from the classic discrete optmization problems, thus demanding the special treatments and the finegrained tuning technologies. ParaXML internally adopts a fine-grained work-stealing scheme to dynamically control the load balance among the parallel-running threads, and a novel approach is also introduced to trace the stealing actions and the running results to facilitate the reducing of those parallel-running results. Besides, ParaXML provides the tuning options, particularly for the large XML documents, to control the trade-off between the parallelism gain and task-partitioning overhead. To show the feasibility and effectiveness of the ParaXML model, we demonstrate our parallel implementations of three fundamental XML processing tasks based on the ParaXML: traversal, serializing and parsing. The empirical study in this paper shows that those parallel implementations substantially improved the performance and scale well on a multicore machine.

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