Re: Amazon now supporting GPU focused EC2 instances

On 2010-11-15 12:37, Thom Brown wrote:

On 15 November 2010 11:26, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:

I keep wondering if there's a role for GPUs in Postgres and haven't
figure out how to integrate them yet but the day when we'll be
expected to exploit them seems to be getting nearer:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-gpu-instance.html

Is this somewhere OpenCL is an option?

There is a talk about PgOpenCL upcoming -
http://www.postgresql.eu/events/schedule/pgday2010/session/56-introduction-to-pgopencl-a-new-procedural-language-for-postgresql-unlocking-the-power-of-the-gpgpu/

Maybe I've sent this link earlier, but the VLDB 2008 paper Parallelizing Query Optimization (http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/1/1453882.pdf) might be interesting: not much IO between CPU and GPU. (hmm how much catalog access is necessary for cost estimization)). I suspect the biggest challenge is rewriting essential parts into a SIMD algorithm.

regards,
Yeb Havinga