Re: Using the power of the GPU

If you're absolutely, positive dying for some excuse to do this (i.e.
I don't currently have the budget to pay you anything to do it), I
work in a manufacturing environment where we are using a postgresql
database to store bills of materials for parts. One of the things we
also have to do is to figure out is what combination parts cut out of
a piece of sheet metal will waste the least amount of material--your
standard nesting problem. It would be useful to have the ability to
use a single computer to store all the part dimensions in the
database using the various postgres geometry stuff (which we're not
currently doing) and then be able to flingin brute force fashion
zillions of shapes at the GPU in all different orientations to get
the best combination of bills of materials that would use the least
amount of metal.

Aren't you sorry you asked? ;)

-- Ilan

On Jun 8, 2007, at 1:26 PM, Billings, John 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? If so which
> part of the database, and what kind of parallel algorithms would be
> used?
> Thanks,
> -- John Billings
>

Ilan Volow
"Implicit code is inherently evil, and here's the reason why:"