Re: CUDA Sorting

On Sep19, 2011, at 19:46 , Stephen Frost wrote:
> I agree that it'd be interesting to do, but I share Lord Stark's
> feelings about the challenges and lack of potential gain- it's a very
> small set of queries that would benefit from this.  You need to be
> working with enough data to make the cost of tranferring it all over to
> the GPU worthwhile, just for starters..

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to employ a GPU for more low-level
tasks. Things like sorting or hashing are hard to move to the
GPU in postgres because, in the general case, they involve essentially
arbitrary user-defined functions. But couldn't for example the WAL CRC
computation be moved to a GPU? Or, to get really crazy, even the search
for the optimal join order (only for a large number of joins though,
i.e. where we currently switch to a genetic algorithmn)?

best regards,
Florian Pflug