Re: Amazon now supporting GPU focused EC2 instances

Thom Brown-2 wrote:
>
> On 15 November 2010 11:26, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
>
>> I keep wondering if there's a role for GPUs in Postgres and haven't
>> figure out how to integrate them yet but the day when we'll be
>> expected to exploit them seems to be getting nearer:
>>
>>
>> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-gpu-instance.html
>>
>> <http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers>
>
>
> Is this somewhere OpenCL is an option?
>
> --
> Thom Brown
> Twitter: @darkixion
> IRC (freenode): dark_ixion
> Registered Linux user: #516935
>
>

OpenCL is a good option as its

1) Open - supported by many vendors Apple, AMD/ATI, Nvidia, IBM, Intel, ..

2) Runs on CPU's and GPU's. - There is definitely I/O overhead and other
challenges to running code on a GPU. See my Pg EU Day 2010 prezzy
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44661593/PostgreSQL-OpenCL-Procedural-Language.

3) Supports SIMD instructions and multi-threading on CPU's - No GPU
required! This can boost an app by executing 4 floating points ops
concurrently per FPU.

There is an interesting class of chip due from AMD, due in mid 2011, with
combined CPU & GPU. Hopefully these chips will reduce the GPU I/O
overhead and be more amenable to program concurrency. See
http://sites.amd.com/us/fusion/apu/Pages/fusion.aspx.

For some applications running SIMD instructions and using all the cores
will provide a boost. Intel are pushing this point staying running SSE4
instructions on 4 or 8 cores can get up to 16x increase. Of course you can
hand-roll all this SSE4 code, But why not let an OpenCL compiler get
you 80% of the increases?

My first phase was to implement some OpenCL code as User Defined
Functions. This comes with the overhead of creating OpenCL run-time context
and compiling OpenCL Kernels. Phase Two is the OpenCL as procedure language
and moving run-time context and program compiling to PG_init() and the SQL
create function statement.

For floating point numeric and image processing apps OpenCL and GPU's are
pretty much a no-brainer.
They are are easier to parallelize and and have been proven in many case to
benefit from GPU's

The big question is can OpenCL improve any existing apps with sorting and
searching in parallel? We can find out more in Jan 2011 when I'll make a
drop of the pGOpenCL code.

Regards

Tim

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