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With modern computer architecture evolving, two problems conspire against the state-of-the-art approaches in parallel query execution: (i) to take advantage of many-cores, all query work must be distributed evenly among (soon) hundreds of threads in order to achieve good speedup, yet (ii) dividing the work evenly is difficult even with accurate data statistics due to the complexity of modern out-of-order cores. As a result, the existing approaches for plan-driven parallelism run into load balancing and context-switching bottlenecks, and therefore no longer scale. A third problem faced by many-core architectures is the decentralization of memory controllers, which leads to Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA). In response, we present the morsel-driven query execution framework, where scheduling becomes a fine-grained run-time task that is NUMA-aware. Morsel-driven query processing takes small fragments of …