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Why Don't Open Source Databases Use GPUs?
An anonymous reader writes "A recent paper from Georgia Tech (abstract, paper itself) describes a system than can run the complete TPC-H benchmark suite on an NVIDIA Titan card, at a 7x speedup over a commercial database running on a 32-core Amazon EC2 node, and a 68x speedup over a single core Xeon. A previous story described an MIT project that achieved similar speedups. There has been a steady trickle of work on GPU-accelerated database systems for several years, but it doesn't seem like any code has made it into Open Source databases like MonetDB, MySQL, CouchDB, etc. Why not? Many queries that I write are simpler than TPC-H, so what's holding them back?"
It's waiting for you to get on it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Research shows that there is good news and bad news on this approach.
The good news: Certain SQL queries can get a massive speedup by using a GPU.
The bad news: Only a small subset of queries got any benefit. They generally looked like this:
SELECT pixels FROM characters JOIN polygons JOIN textures
ON characters.character_id = polygons.character_id
WHERE characters.name = 'orc-wielding-mace' AND textures.name = 'heavy-leather-armor' AND color_theme = 'green'
ORDER BY y, x