Re: would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ?

jim@nasby.net (Jim Nasby) writes:
> On Dec 10, 2010, at 6:18 PM, Jeff Janes wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Hamza Bin Sohail <hsohail@purdue.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello hackers,
>>> 
>>> I think i'm at the right place to ask this question.
>>> 
>>> Based on your experience and the fact that you have written the Postgres code,
>>> can you tell what a rough break-down - in your opinion - is for the time the
>>> database spends time just "fetching and writing " stuff to memory and the
>>> actual computation.
>> 
>> The database is a general purpose tool.  Pick a bottleneck you wish
>> to have, and probably someone uses it in a way that causes that
>> bottleneck to occur.
>
> A common bottleneck we run into is sorting of text
> data. Unfortunately, I doubt that a GPU would be able to help with
> that.

Actually, that is a case where some successful experimentation has been
done.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/ngm/15-823/project/Final.pdf

Making it reliable to the point of being generally usable when someone
installs Postgres via a generic packaging tool in default fashion may be
somewhat more challenging!

But it appears that sorting is a plausible application for GPUs.
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