Re: Amazon now supporting GPU focused EC2 instances

On 2010-11-15 18:49, Greg Stark wrote:

> I've seen papers on doing relational joins using GPUs and I'm sure
> there are other algorithms we wonderful stuff we could do. But if it
> comes at the cost of being able to handle arbitrary join clauses it'll
> be a tough sacrifice to make.

Perhaps the coolest use of all is as an intermediate filtering stage for 
spatial joins, using collision detection.  Draw your data and your 
search region (slightly enlarged) as objects and ask the graphics card 
if the search region collides with anything.  Much like it might ask "is 
this player character bumping into any walls?"

IIRC it's been prototyped in Oracle with impressive results.  Using 
OpenGL, so quite portable between GPUs.


Jeroen