The continued evolution of computing hardware and infrastructure imposes new challenges and bottlenecks to program performance. As a result, traditional database architectures that focus solely on I/O optimization increasingly fail to utilize hardware resources efficiently. Multi-core CPUs, GPUs, new memory and storage technologies (such as flash and phase change memory), and low-power hardware imposes a great challenge to optimizing database performance. Consequently, exploiting the characteristics of modern hardware has become an important topic of database systems research.

The goal is to make database systems adapt automatically to the sophisticated hardware characteristics, thus maximizing performance transparently to applications. To achieve this goal, the data management community needs interdisciplinary collaboration with computer architecture, compiler, operating systems and storage researchers. This involves rethinking traditional data structures, query processing algorithms, and database software architectures to adapt to the advances in the underlying hardware infrastructure.