Обсуждение: GPU Accelerated Sorting

Not sure if anyone else saw this, but it struck me as an interesting
idea if it could be added to PostgreSQL. GPU accelerated database
operations could be very... interesting. Of course, this could be
difficult to do in a way that usefully increases performance of
PostgreSQL, but I'll leave that up to you guys to figure out.

http://code.google.com/p/back40computing/wiki/RadixSorting



--
Eliot Gable

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors: we borrow it from our
children." ~David Brower

"I decided the words were too conservative for me. We're not borrowing
from our children, we're stealing from them--and it's not even
considered to be a crime." ~David Brower

"Esse oportet ut vivas, non vivere ut edas." (Thou shouldst eat to
live; not live to eat.) ~Marcus Tullius Cicero

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Eliot Gable <egable@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure if anyone else saw this, but it struck me as an interesting
> idea if it could be added to PostgreSQL. GPU accelerated database
> operations could be very... interesting. Of course, this could be
> difficult to do in a way that usefully increases performance of
> PostgreSQL, but I'll leave that up to you guys to figure out.
>
> http://code.google.com/p/back40computing/wiki/RadixSorting

It would be hard to use this because, in addition to the fact that
this is specific to a very particular type of hardware, it only works
if you're trying to do a very particular type of sort.  For example,
it wouldn't handle multi-byte characters properly.  And it wouldn't
handle integers properly either - you'd end up sorting negatives after
positives.  You could possibly still find applications for it but
they'd be quite narrow, I think.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company