Re: CUDA Sorting

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> 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

Of course that could change if adding a GPU would help Postgres... I
would expect it to help mostly for data warehouse batch query type
systems, especially ones with very large i/o subsystems that can
saturate the memory bus with sequential i/o. "Run your large batch
queries twice as fast by adding a $400 part to your $40,000 server"
might be a pretty compelling sales pitch :)

That said, to help in the case I described you would have to implement
the tapesort algorithm on the GPU as well. I expect someone has
implemented heaps for CUDA/OpenCL already though.

-- 
greg