Re: Using the GPU

On 6/8/07, Billings, John <John(dot)Billings(at)paetec(dot)com> wrote:
> Does anyone think that PostgreSQL could benefit from using the video card
> as a parallel computing device? I'm working on a project using Nvidia's
> CUDA with an 8800 series video card to handle non-graphical algorithms.
> I'm curious if anyone thinks that this technology could be used to speed up
> a database?

Absolutely.

> If so which part of the database, and what kind of parallel algorithms would be used?

GPUs are parallel vector processing pipelines, which as far as I can
tell do not lend themselves right away to the data structures that
PostgreSQL uses; they're optimized for processing high volumes of
homogenously typed values in sequence.

From what I know about its internals, like most relational databases
PostgreSQL stores each tuple as a sequence of values (v1, v2, ...,
vN). Each tuple has a table of offsets into the tuple so that you can
quickly find a value based on an attribute; in other words, data is
not fixed-length or in fixed positions, table scans need to process
one tuple at a time.

GPUs would be a lot easier to integrate with databases such as Monet,
KDB and C-Store, which partition tables vertically -- each column in a
table is stored separately a vector of values.

Alexander.