Re: CUDA Sorting

On 09/19/2011 10:12 AM, Greg Stark wrote:
> With the GPU I'm curious to see how well
> it handles multiple processes contending for resources, it might be a
> flashy feature that gets lots of attention but might not really be
> very useful in practice. But it would be very interesting to see.
>

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. The very clear trend now is that all
systems other than gaming ones ship with motherboard graphics chipsets
more than powerful enough for any task but that. I just checked the 5
most popular configurations of server I see my customers deploy
PostgreSQL onto (a mix of Dell and HP units), and you don't get a
serious GPU from any of them.

Intel's next generation Ivy Bridge chipset, expected for the spring of
2012, is going to add support for OpenCL to the built-in motherboard
GPU. We may eventually see that trickle into the server hardware side
of things too.

I've never seen a PostgreSQL server capable of running CUDA, and I don't
expect that to change.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us