Re: Using the GPU

On 6/16/07, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Alexander Staubo" <alex(at)purefiction(dot)net> writes:
> > On 6/16/07, Tom Allison <tom(at)tacocat(dot)net> wrote:
> >> It might make an interesting project, but I would be really depressed
> >> if I had to go buy an NVidia card instead of investing in more RAM to
> >> optimize my performance! <g>
>
> > Why does it matter what kind of hardware you can (not "have to") buy
> > to give your database a performance boost? With a GPU, you would have
> > one more component that you could upgrade to improve performance;
> > that's more possibilities, not less. I only see a problem with a
> > database that would *require* a GPU to achieve adequate performance,
> > or to function at all, but that's not what this thread is about.
>
> Too often, arguments of this sort disregard the opportunity costs of
> development going in one direction vs another. If we make any
> significant effort to make Postgres use a GPU, that's development effort
> spent on that rather than some other optimization [...]

I don't see how this goes against what I wrote. I was merely
addressing Tom Allison's comment, which seems to be an unnecessary
fear. By analogy, not everyone uses hardware RAID, for example, but
PostgreSQL can benefit greatly from it, so it does not make sense to
worry about "having to buy" it. Then again, Tom's comment may have
been in jest.

Alexanderr.