On 19 September 2011 15:36, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On 09/19/2011 10:12 AM, Greg Stark wrote:
>>
>> With the GPU I'm curious to see how well
>> it handles multiple processes contending for resources, it might be a
>> flashy feature that gets lots of attention but might not really be
>> very useful in practice. But it would be very interesting to see.
>>
>
> The main problem here is that the sort of hardware commonly used for
> production database servers doesn't have any serious enough GPU to support
> CUDA/OpenCL available. The very clear trend now is that all systems other
> than gaming ones ship with motherboard graphics chipsets more than powerful
> enough for any task but that. I just checked the 5 most popular
> configurations of server I see my customers deploy PostgreSQL onto (a mix of
> Dell and HP units), and you don't get a serious GPU from any of them.
>
> Intel's next generation Ivy Bridge chipset, expected for the spring of 2012,
> is going to add support for OpenCL to the built-in motherboard GPU. We may
> eventually see that trickle into the server hardware side of things too.
>
> I've never seen a PostgreSQL server capable of running CUDA, and I don't
> expect that to change.
But couldn't that also be seen as a chicken/egg situation? No-one
buys GPUs for database servers because the database won't make use of
it, but databases don't implement GPU functionality since database
servers don't tend to have GPUs. It's more likely the latter of those
two reasonings would have to be the first to budge.
But nVidia does produce a non-graphics-oriented GPGPU line called
Tesla dedicated to such processing.
--
Thom Brown
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