Re: GPU Accelerated Sorting

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Eliot Gable <egable(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Not sure if anyone else saw this, but it struck me as an interesting
> idea if it could be added to PostgreSQL. GPU accelerated database
> operations could be very... interesting. Of course, this could be
> difficult to do in a way that usefully increases performance of
> PostgreSQL, but I'll leave that up to you guys to figure out.
>
> http://code.google.com/p/back40computing/wiki/RadixSorting

It would be hard to use this because, in addition to the fact that
this is specific to a very particular type of hardware, it only works
if you're trying to do a very particular type of sort. For example,
it wouldn't handle multi-byte characters properly. And it wouldn't
handle integers properly either - you'd end up sorting negatives after
positives. You could possibly still find applications for it but
they'd be quite narrow, I think.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company