SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware

Summary: SwiftSpatial is an FPGA-based accelerator for spatial joins, featuring multiple join units and a scheduler for R-tree traversal and PBSM. It delivers 41.03x latency reduction and 6.16x energy savings vs CPU/GPU baselines, enabling edge deployment. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h104a9d5d098dd25a
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.270772e-05
Overall Rank: 8,812 | 40.78%
DOI: 10.1145/3725361
PDF: Download (CC BY-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wenqi Jiang (ETH Zurich)
2. Oleh-Yevhen Khavrona (ETH Zurich)
3. Martin Parvanov (ETH Zurich)
4. Gustavo Alonso (ETH Zurich)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{jiang_sigmod25,
        title = {{SwiftSpatial: Spatial Joins on Modern Hardware}},
        author = {Jiang, Wenqi and Khavrona, Oleh-Yevhen and Parvanov, Martin and Alonso, Gustavo},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3725361},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725361},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,451	Discovery of Denial Constraints with Hardware Acceleration	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,915	RayBooster: A Ray Tracing Engine to Accelerate SedonaDB	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 37 of 37 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0019923528
4	The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles	1990	SIGMOD	0.0011402175
44	The R+-Tree: A Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Index for Objects	1987	VLDB	0.00045319457
146	Efficient Processing of Spatial Joins Using R-trees	1993	SIGMOD	0.00029048509
265	A Class of Data Structures for Associative Searching	1984	PODS	0.00022748432
336	Hilbert R-tree: An Improved R-tree Using Fractals	1994	VLDB	0.00020652147
527	Multi-Step Processing of Spatial Joins	1994	SIGMOD	0.00016874202
752	Partition Based Spatial-Merge Join	1996	SIGMOD	0.00014239937
1,081	Hadoop-GIS: A High Performance Spatial Data Warehousing System over MapReduce	2013	VLDB	0.00012126286
1,178	Simba: Efficient In-Memory Spatial Analytics	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011627256
1,313	X-Engine: An Optimized Storage Engine for Large-scale E-commerce Transaction Processing	2019	SIGMOD	0.00011055196
1,512	Cloud-Native Database Systems at Alibaba: Opportunities and Challenges	2019	VLDB	0.00010425349
2,321	Hardware Acceleration for Spatial Selections and Joins	2003	SIGMOD	8.6421843e-05
2,589	Spatial Joins Using R-trees: Breadth-First Traversal with Global Optimizations	1997	VLDB	8.2479257e-05
2,762	How Good Are Modern Spatial Analytics Systems?	2018	VLDB	8.0407221e-05
3,223	A Raster Approximation for the Processing of Spatial Joins	1998	VLDB	7.5114215e-05
3,254	Quadtree and R-tree Indexes in Oracle Spatial: A Comparison using GIS Data	2002	SIGMOD	7.487573e-05
4,219	Spatial Partitioning Techniques in SpatialHadoop	2015	VLDB	6.7231647e-05
4,514	LocationSpark: A Distributed In-Memory Data Management System for Big Spatial Data	2016	VLDB	6.5629213e-05
4,840	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB	6.3842693e-05
4,851	The RLR-Tree: A Reinforcement Learning Based R-Tree for Spatial Data	2023	SIGMOD	6.377837e-05
4,868	Caribou: Intelligent Distributed Storage	2017	VLDB	6.3722461e-05
4,932	FPGA-based Data Partitioning	2017	SIGMOD	6.3455411e-05
4,958	TOUCH: In-Memory Spatial Join by Hierarchical Data-Oriented Partitioning	2013	SIGMOD	6.3374701e-05
5,472	GPU Rasterization for Real-Time Spatial Aggregation over Arbitrary Polygons	2018	VLDB	6.1168576e-05
6,230	Chameleon: a Heterogeneous and Disaggregated Accelerator System for Retrieval-Augmented Language Models	2025	VLDB	5.842393e-05
6,234	A GPU-friendly Geometric Data Model and Algebra for Spatial Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.8409173e-05
6,463	The Era of Big Spatial Data	2017	VLDB	5.7741601e-05
6,803	Spatial Joins in Main Memory: Implementation Matters!	2015	VLDB	5.6771982e-05
7,211	Hardware Acceleration of Compression and Encryption in SAP HANA	2022	VLDB	5.5819096e-05
7,218	SKT: A One-Pass Multi-Sketch Data Analytics Accelerator	2021	VLDB	5.5810969e-05
7,285	Lowering the Latency of Data Processing Pipelines Through FPGA based Hardware Acceleration	2020	VLDB	5.5639701e-05
8,231	Raster Intervals: An Approximation Technique for Polygon Intersection Joins	2023	SIGMOD	5.3717128e-05
8,371	Accelerating Pattern Matching Queries in Hybrid CPU-FPGA Architectures	2017	SIGMOD	5.3435334e-05
8,522	Optimistic Data Parallelism for FPGA-Accelerated Sketching	2023	VLDB	5.3225121e-05
9,292	AT-GIS: Highly Parallel Spatial Query Processing with Associative Transducers	2016	SIGMOD	5.2008018e-05
10,205	DASH: Asynchronous Hardware Data Processing Services	2023	CIDR	5.0593471e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,376	Distributed GPU Joins on Fast RDMA-capable Networks	2023	SIGMOD
2	527	Multi-Step Processing of Spatial Joins	1994	SIGMOD
3	2,589	Spatial Joins Using R-trees: Breadth-First Traversal with Global Optimizations	1997	VLDB
4	146	Efficient Processing of Spatial Joins Using R-trees	1993	SIGMOD
5	11,032	Hardware Acceleration for Spatial Databases: Building Next-Generation Query Engines Using Ray Tracing Cores	2026	VLDB
6	4,840	An Experimental Analysis of Iterated Spatial Joins in Main Memory	2013	VLDB
7	1,924	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB
8	2,749	Hardware Acceleration in Commercial Databases: A Case Study of Spatial Operations	2004	VLDB
9	5,629	FPGA-based Multithreading for In-Memory Hash Joins	2015	CIDR
10	2,321	Hardware Acceleration for Spatial Selections and Joins	2003	SIGMOD