Running ClickHouse on NVIDIA Vera CPU: Is your favorite database up to the challenge?

ClickHouse evaluated its unmodified database software on NVIDIA’s early-access Vera CPU platform, where a dual-socket system provides 176 Arm-v9.2 physical cores, 352 hardware threads, substantial cache capacity, and up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth, placing it at the top of the ClickBench hardware leaderboard. Using a 1 TB in-memory table containing 62.5 billion strings, the engineers tested filtering, low-cardinality aggregation, and joins to examine how effectively query execution scales with available compute resources. A simple substring filter became memory-bandwidth-bound at roughly 64 threads, reaching about 901 GB/s, while more computationally intensive regular-expression filtering, hash-based aggregation, and joins scaled nearly linearly through the 176 physical cores, with diminishing benefits from simultaneous multithreading beyond that point. The join test used ClickHouse’s parallel hash join and runtime filtering, while query pipeline plans illustrated that major processing stages run concurrently across many data chunks. A separate single-threaded SIMD test showed that compiler vectorization using Vera’s NEON instructions reduced a numeric filter’s runtime from 1.48 seconds to 0.42 seconds, and ClickHouse is adding support for Vera’s higher-throughput SVE2 instructions. The results are presented as evidence that ClickHouse’s parallel query engine can make extensive use of Vera’s core count and memory capabilities, while identifying continued opportunities for performance improvements in data structures, caching, compression, batching, and asynchronous processing.

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