Well, from that perspective, it becomes a "chicken and egg" problem. Without the software support to use a GPU in a server for acceleration, nobody's going to build a server with a GPU. However, as previously stated, I can understand the challenges with determining whether the offloading would even be worthwhile (given disk performance constraints and GPU memory loading constraints vs payoff for acceleration), much less finding actual real-world queries that would benefit from it. I am sure there are probably hundreds of other performance improvements that could be made that would have much more wide-spread appeal, but it's an interesting thing to consider. This is not the first thing that's come up that a database could use a GPU for in order to improve performance, and it won't be the last. It's something to keep in mind, and if enough additional items come up where GPUs can do better than CPUs, it might be worthwhile to start implementing some of those things. Maybe if enough of them get implemented, there will be enough overall performance increase to make it worthwhile to put a GPU in a database server. Besides, if you can sort data on a GPU faster than a CPU, you can probably also search for data faster on the GPU than on the CPU under similar conditions. With memory increasing like crazy in servers, it might be worthwhile to keep indexes entirely in memory (but keep them sync'd to the disk, obviously) and for extremely large tables, dump them to the GPU for a massively parallel search. In fact, if you can get enough GPU memory that you could keep them entirely in the GPU memory and keep them updated there any time they change, you could see some real performance pay-offs. I'm not saying someone should just go out and do this right now, but it might be worthwhile to keep it in mind as code is re-written or updated in the future how it might be structured to more easily implement something like this in the future. On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Gaël Le Mignot <gael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello, > > In my humble opinion, while it can sound interesting from a theorical > point of view to outloads some operations to the GPU, there is a huge > pratical problem in current world : databases which are big enough to > require such heavy optimization are usually runned on server hardware, > which very rarely have powerful GPU. > > There may be a small target of computers having both GPU and heavy > database, but that sounds very exceptional to me, so investing effort > into it sounds a bit unjustified to me. > > Except as a matter of scientific research, which is it of course > important for the future. > > Regards, > > -- > Gaël Le Mignot - gael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Pilot Systems - 9, rue Desargues - 75011 Paris > Tel : +33 1 44 53 05 55 - www.pilotsystems.net > Gérez vos contacts et vos newsletters : www.cockpit-mailing.com > -- Eliot Gable "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors: we borrow it from our children." ~David Brower "I decided the words were too conservative for me. We're not borrowing from our children, we're stealing from them--and it's not even considered to be a crime." ~David Brower "Esse oportet ut vivas, non vivere ut edas." (Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.) ~Marcus Tullius Cicero -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
