Hi, I just posted a message to the user group mailing list to share my slides that I used in my talk at Apache: Big Data ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/mdb79qp3ucg732w/AcceleratingApacheDrillWithFPGA.pdf?dl=0). In the last few slides, I mentioned the UDF support in Drill, and I would like to request a feature in regard to it.
I am trying to offload string matching to an FPGA that is attached to the server through PCIe. I thought of creating a UDF to call the OpenCL library to send the data to the FPGA but ended up not doing it because the UDF is called for each row in the batch, and this leads to big overhead for transferring the data to the FPGA. So instead, I modified FilterRecordBatch to get access to the DrillBuf to send the entire batch at once. >From a FPGA application developer's point of view, it would make things easier if we had access to the batch (not to a record) through a UDF interface because this will make the overhead of sending the data to the FPGA through PCIe much smaller. Is it possible to have such an interface? FPGA is starting to make its way to data centers, and I am trying to figure out how to do it. I would be a big help if I had this UDF feature. Thanks, Eric
