From: | Hamza Bin Sohail <hsohail(at)purdue(dot)edu> |
---|---|
To: | pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org |
Subject: | would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ? |
Date: | 2010-12-10 23:09:40 |
Message-ID: | 1292022580.4d02b3345222d@webmail.purdue.edu |
Views: | Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email |
Thread: | |
Lists: | pgsql-hackers |
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 reason i ask this is because off-late there has been a
push to put reconfigurable hardware on processor cores. What this means is that
database writers can possibly identify the compute-intensive portions of the
code and write hardware accelerators and/or custom instructions and offload
computation to these hardware accelerators which they would have programmed
onto the FPGA.
There is not much utility in doing this if there aren't considerable compute-
intensive operations in the database (which i would be surprise if true ). I
would suspect joins, complex queries etc may be very compute-intensive. Please
correct me if i'm wrong. Moreover, if you were told that you have a
reconfigurable hardware which can perform pretty complex computations 10x
faster than the base, would you think about synthesizing it directly on an fpga
and use it ?
I'd be more than glad to hear your guesstimates.
Thanks alot !
Hamza
From | Date | Subject | |
---|---|---|---|
Next Message | Joshua D. Drake | 2010-12-10 23:13:23 | Re: Anyone for SSDs? |
Previous Message | Andrew Dunstan | 2010-12-10 23:08:38 | Re: create tablespace fails silently, or succeeds improperly |