Re: GPU Accelerated Sorting

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Gaël Le Mignot <gael(at)pilotsystems(dot)net> 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.

That's changed recently:
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/GPUservers.htm

> 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.

I tend to agree. OTOH, imagine using a 400 core GPU for offloading
stuff that isn't just a sort, like travelling salesman type problems.
The beauty of if is, that with pgsql support dozens of scripting
languages, you wouldn't have to build anything into pg's backends, you
could just write it in a pl langauge.

--
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.