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?"

Comments

Re:Something something online sorting

[Arker]

"The only difference is the video card."

ROFL you may know how to build a gamer rig but you certainly know nothing about servers, to have said that.

You'll use an entirely different class of hardware from the ground up. Different class of motherboard, different class of RAM, at most you *might* use the same box and power supply. You dont need a videocard at all, just a serial port, and these days it's more likely to be a rackmount than a box anyway.