Exploration of Oracle NUMBER Addition Hardware

Oracle Engineering, 2011-12

Liaison(s): Michael Dayringer ’08
Advisor(s): Karl Wang
Students(s): William Koven (TL), Sandrine Dang, Dylan Stow (S), Aaron Atzil (S)

The Oracle clinic team explored the design space of hardware to perform addition on Oracle NUM-BERs, a type of floating point number used in Oracle databases. There are currently no hardware solutions for the addition of Oracles NUMBERs in use. The team implemented several different architectures focusing on tradeoffs between energy, speed, and area. The hardware developed is faster and uses less energy than Oracle’s current soft-ware implementation.