HPTS 2026 (Day 2 and Day 3)

This is the second half of my HPTS 2026 notes. Day 1 was mostly about AI and the importance of specifications. Day 2 and day 3 cover hardware, object storage, failures, consensus, and lakehouses.Session 5: Hardware will save us all (chair: Natassa Ailamaki)The Fastest Way to be the Fastest (Bobbi Yogatama, NVIDIA)GPUs and databases have a love-hate relationship, and Bobbi listed the three reasons: limited GPU memory capacity, the interconnect bottleneck, and engineering complexity. The first two are being fixed by the hardware roadmap. HBM is getting larger and faster. Interconnects and network fabrics are getting faster. But engineering complexity requires some work. No one is eager to rewrite their database to get it work with a GPU.Bobbi introduced Sirius, a GPU-native composable analytics engine. It offers a drop-in accelerator for your existing database, with GPU-native execution underneath. MICE is the design principle: modular, interoperable, composable, extensible. Bobbi…