Re: would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ?

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Hamza Bin Sohail <hsohail(at)purdue(dot)edu> wrote:
>
> Hello hackers,
>
> I think i'm at the right place to ask this question.
>
> Based on your experience and the fact that you have written the Postgres code,
> can you tell what a rough break-down - in your opinion - is for the time the
> database spends time just "fetching and writing " stuff to memory and the
> actual computation.

The database is a general purpose tool. Pick a bottleneck you wish to have,
and probably someone uses it in a way that causes that bottleneck to occur.

> The reason i ask this is because off-late there has been a
> push to put reconfigurable hardware on processor cores. What this means is that
> database writers can possibly identify the compute-intensive portions of the
> code and write hardware accelerators and/or custom instructions and offload
> computation to these hardware accelerators which they would have programmed
> onto the FPGA.

When people don't use prepared statements, parsing can become a bottleneck.

If Bison's yyparse could be put on a FPGA in a transparent way, than
anyone using
Bison, including PG, might benefit.

That's just one example, of course.

Cheers,

Jeff