Hey hackers,
I'm still having problems reading the values of the columns in tuplesort.c, in order to understand how to port this to CUDA.
Should I use the heap_getattr macro to read them?
2011/9/24 Hannu Krosing
<hannu@krosing.net>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.