Re: Using the power of the GPU - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Gregory Stark
Subject Re: Using the power of the GPU
Date
Msg-id 87vednop3u.fsf@oxford.xeocode.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Using the power of the GPU  (Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh@pop.jaring.my>)
List pgsql-general
I did find this:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ngm/15-823/project/Draft.pdf

But there are several reasons this seems to be a dead-end route for Postgres:

1) It's limited to in-memory sorts. Speeding up in-memory sorts by a linear
   factor seems uninteresting. Anything large enough for a small linear
   speedup to be interesting will be doing a disk sort anyways.

2) It's limited to one concurrent sort. There doesn't seem to be any facility
   for managing the shared resource of the GPU.

3) It's limited to sorting a single float. Postgres has an extensible type
   system. The use case for sorting a list of floats is pretty narrow. It's
   also limited to 32-bit floats and it isn't clear if that's an
   implementation detail or a hardware limitation of current GPUs.

4) It uses a hardware-specific driver for Nvidia GPUs. Ideally there would be
   some kind of kernel driver which took care of managing the shared resource
   (like the kernel manages things like disk, network, memory, etc) and either
   that or a library layer would provide an abstract interface so that the
   Postgres code would be hardware independent.

--
  Gregory Stark
  EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com


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