APSkyline: Improved Skyline Computation for Multicore Architectures

The trend towards in-memory analytics and CPUs with an increasing number of cores calls for new algorithms that can efficiently utilize the available resources. This need is particularly evident in the case of CPU-intensive query operators. One example of such a query with applicability in data analytics is the skyline query. In this paper, we present APSkyline, a new approach for multicore skyline query processing, which adheres to the partition-execute-merge framework. Contrary to existing research, we focus on the partitioning phase to achieve significant performance gains, an issue largely overlooked in previous work in multicore processing. In particular, APSkyline employs an angle-based partitioning approach, which increases the degree of pruning that can be achieved in the execute phase, thus significantly reducing the number of candidate points that need to be checked in the final merging phase. APSkyline is extremely efficient for hard cases of skyline processing, as in the cases of datasets with large skyline result sets, where it is meaningful to exploit multicore processing.