Re: Will PostgreSQL get ported to CUDA?

From: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: Dann Corbit <DCorbit(at)connx(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Will PostgreSQL get ported to CUDA?
Date: 2008-01-30 09:51:41
Message-ID: 1201686701.4453.20.camel@ebony.site
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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

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