Re: CUDA Sorting

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

Note that Amazon's EC2 offerings include a configuration with a pair of GPUs.

Whether or not this continues has a certain "chicken and egg" aspect to it...

- I'm glad that Amazon is selling such a configuration, as it does
give folks the option of trying it out.

- Presumably, it will only continue on their product list if customers
do more than merely "trying it out."

I think I'd be shocked if PostgreSQL offered much support for such a
configuration in the next year; despite there being some work ongoing,
drawing the functionality into core would require Core decisions that
I'd be surprised to see so quickly.

Unfortunately, that may be slow enough progress that PostgreSQL won't
be contributing to the would-be success of the technology.

If this kind of GPU usage fails to attract much interest, then it's
probably a good thing that we're not committed to it. But if other
uses lead to it taking off, then we'll doubtless get a lot of noise on
lists about a year from now to the effect "Why don't you have this in
core yet? Not 3773t enough!?!?"

Having a bit of progress taking place now would probably be good
timing, in case it *does* take off...
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"