On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 22:12 -0800, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/ShowPR~PUBCODE~030~ACCT~3000000100~ISSUE~0801~RELTYPE~HPCC~PRODCODE~00000000~PRODLETT~C.html
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn.html
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html
>
I assume you mean to have interesting CPU-intensive tasks offloaded to
the GPU, rather than full-porting...
I looked into this and it seems like an innovative plan technically, but
most servers running PostgreSQL don't have a GPU. So it makes it more a
personal computer opportunity rather than a business server one, no?
Plus I wouldn't look at it ahead of a debugger being available.
If you wrote a CUDA function to perform a useful operation that might be
a good starting place to general understanding of how we might use this
in the future. PostgreSQL is extensible, so an add-in function might be
a useful module on pgfoundry.
Maybe we could build in a hook to allow an external-function library to
provide sort capability... but I don't think anyone is going to take it
seriously for database core without a greater than normal amount of test
results and prototypes.
-- Simon Riggs 2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
