Avoiding data jams

In gigantic server farms around the world, billions of database entries are queried every second. Researchers have developed a system that drastically improves the circulation of this flow of information. The economic and environmental benefits are considerable. Databases have revolutionized the business world. Every bottle of shampoo you buy, every purchase you make, is just one more data point sent out to your bank's and your supermarket's servers. This enormous quantity of detailed information allows merchants to optimize their inventories and displays and bankers to optimize the flow of money. Gigantic farms of servers are deployed in an effort to keep up with this breakneck pace of information storage and transfer. Researchers in EPFL's DATA Laboratory have developed DBToaster, a system that speeds up the pace of operations by a factor of 100 - 10,000. The latest version has just been made available on www.dbtoaster.org. "Ten years ago, CERN set up one of the world's largest databases," explains EPFL professor Christoph Koch, DBToaster's creator. "Today, your average supermarket has a bigger system." This inflation has escalated dramatically, to the point that optimizing databases has become an environmental issue. In the U.S., electricity use by server farms is growing exponentially, currently representing 2% of total electricity consumption. Avoiding data jams by accelerating the flow of data