Re: CUDA Sorting

On 09/19/2011 10:12 AM, Greg Stark wrote:
> With the GPU I'm curious to see how well
> it handles multiple processes contending for resources, it might be a
> flashy feature that gets lots of attention but might not really be
> very useful in practice. But it would be very interesting to see.
>    

The main problem here is that the sort of hardware commonly used for 
production database servers doesn't have any serious enough GPU to 
support CUDA/OpenCL available.  The very clear trend now is that all 
systems other than gaming ones ship with motherboard graphics chipsets 
more than powerful enough for any task but that.  I just checked the 5 
most popular configurations of server I see my customers deploy 
PostgreSQL onto (a mix of Dell and HP units), and you don't get a 
serious GPU from any of them.

Intel's next generation Ivy Bridge chipset, expected for the spring of 
2012, is going to add support for OpenCL to the built-in motherboard 
GPU.  We may eventually see that trickle into the server hardware side 
of things too.

I've never seen a PostgreSQL server capable of running CUDA, and I don't 
expect that to change.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us