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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?"
Wow, a fp that hit the nail on the head.
Indeed, database applications tend to bottleneck on I/O, not processor, so most uses would see little gain from this. That's probably the biggest reason no one has bothered to do it.
Certain uses would probably benefit, but then there are other reasons too. You run databases on machines built for it, not gaming machines, so it's not like they already have this hardware. You would have to buy it and add it as an expense. And GPUs are error prone. Not what you want in most database applications either (although again, there may be niches where this would be ok.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
... so they aren't going to pay for hundreds of GPU's.
Especially when they have already blown the budget on fast SSDs that actually make a real difference in real performance, not just synthetic benchmarks.