Re: CUDA Sorting

On 19 September 2011 16:10, Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> wrote:
> On 19 September 2011 15:54, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>> 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
>>
>> Of course that could change if adding a GPU would help Postgres... I
>> would expect it to help mostly for data warehouse batch query type
>> systems, especially ones with very large i/o subsystems that can
>> saturate the memory bus with sequential i/o. "Run your large batch
>> queries twice as fast by adding a $400 part to your $40,000 server"
>> might be a pretty compelling sales pitch :)
>>
>> That said, to help in the case I described you would have to implement
>> the tapesort algorithm on the GPU as well. I expect someone has
>> implemented heaps for CUDA/OpenCL already though.
>
> I seem to recall a paper on such a thing by Carnegie Mellon
> University.  Can't remember where I saw it though.

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

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Thom Brown
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