Re: CUDA Sorting

On Mon, 2011-09-19 at 10:36 -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> On 09/19/2011 10:12 AM, Greg Stark wrote:
> > With the GPU I'm curious to see how well
> > it handles multiple processes contending for resources, it might be a
> > flashy feature that gets lots of attention but might not really be
> > very useful in practice. But it would be very interesting to see.
> >
>
> The main problem here is that the sort of hardware commonly used for
> production database servers doesn't have any serious enough GPU to
> support CUDA/OpenCL available.  The very clear trend now is that all
> systems other than gaming ones ship with motherboard graphics chipsets
> more than powerful enough for any task but that.  I just checked the 5
> most popular configurations of server I see my customers deploy
> PostgreSQL onto (a mix of Dell and HP units), and you don't get a
> serious GPU from any of them.
>
> Intel's next generation Ivy Bridge chipset, expected for the spring of
> 2012, is going to add support for OpenCL to the built-in motherboard
> GPU.  We may eventually see that trickle into the server hardware side
> of things too.
>
> I've never seen a PostgreSQL server capable of running CUDA, and I don't
> expect that to change.

CUDA sorting could be beneficial on general server hardware if it can
run well on multiple cpus in parallel. GPU-s being in essence parallel
processors on fast shared memory, it may be that even on ordinary RAM
and lots of CPUs some CUDA algorithms are a significant win.

and then there is non-graphics GPU availabe on EC2
 Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large Instance
 22 GB of memory 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem”      architecture) 2 x NVIDIA Tesla
“Fermi”M2050 GPUs 1690 GB of instance storage 64-bit platform I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet) API
name:cg1.4xlarge 

It costs $2.10 per hour, probably a lot less if you use the Spot
Instances.

> --
> Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
> PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us
>
>