Greg Smith wrote:
This comes up every year or so. The ability of GPU offloading to help
with sorting has to overcome the additional latency that comes from
copying everything over to it and then getting all the results back.
If you look at the typical types of sorting people see in PostgreSQL,
it's hard to find ones that are a) big enough to benefit from being
offloaded to the GPU like that, while also being b) not so
bottlenecked on disk I/O that speeding up the CPU part matters. And
if you need to sort something in that category, you probably just put
an index on it instead and call it a day.
If you made me make a list of things I'd think would be worthwhile to
spend effort improving in PostgreSQL, this would be on the research
list, but unlikely to even make my personal top 100 things that are
work fiddling with.
Related is 'Parallelizing query optimization'
(http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/1/1453882.pdf) in which they actually
experiment with PostgreSQL. Note that their target platform is general
purpose CPU, not a SIMD GPU processor.
-- Yeb
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