Re: would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-hackers-
> owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Hamza Bin Sohail
> Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 3:10 PM
> To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [HACKERS] would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in
> general) ?
>
>
> 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.

Here is a sample project:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/bakkum_sqlite_gpgpu10.pdf
And another:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/ngm/15-823/project/Final.pdf