Re: Using the GPU

"Alexander Staubo" <alex(at)purefiction(dot)net> writes:
> On 6/16/07, Tom Allison <tom(at)tacocat(dot)net> wrote:
>> It might make an interesting project, but I would be really depressed
>> if I had to go buy an NVidia card instead of investing in more RAM to
>> optimize my performance! <g>

> Why does it matter what kind of hardware you can (not "have to") buy
> to give your database a performance boost? With a GPU, you would have
> one more component that you could upgrade to improve performance;
> that's more possibilities, not less. I only see a problem with a
> database that would *require* a GPU to achieve adequate performance,
> or to function at all, but that's not what this thread is about.

Too often, arguments of this sort disregard the opportunity costs of
development going in one direction vs another. If we make any
significant effort to make Postgres use a GPU, that's development effort
spent on that rather than some other optimization; and more effort,
ongoing indefinitely, to maintain that code; and perhaps the code
will preclude other possible optimizations or features because of
assumptions wired into it. So you can't just claim that using a GPU
might be interesting; you have to persuade people that it's more
interesting than other places where we could spend our
performance-improvement efforts.

regards, tom lane