Spatial joins are among the most time-consuming queries in spatial data
management systems. In this paper, we propose SwiftSpatial, a specialized
accelerator architecture tailored for spatial joins. SwiftSpatial contains
multiple high-performance join units with innovative hybrid parallelism,
several efficient memory management units, and an integrated on-chip join
scheduler. We prototype SwiftSpatial on an FPGA and incorporate the R-tree
synchronous traversal algorithm as the control flow. Benchmarked against
various CPU and GPU-based spatial data processing systems, SwiftSpatial
demonstrates a latency reduction of up to 5.36x relative to the best-performing
baseline, while requiring 6.16x less power. The remarkable performance and
energy efficiency of SwiftSpatial lay a solid foundation for its future
integration into spatial data management systems, both in data centers and at
the edge