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

Thanks alot for all the replies. Very helpful, really appreciate it.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Janes" <jeff.janes@gmail.com>
To: "Hamza Bin Sohail" <hsohail@purdue.edu>
Cc: <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in 
general) ?


> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Hamza Bin Sohail <hsohail@purdue.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
>