MapD Open Sources GPU-Powered Database
I would very much like to see a blog post or some other explanation of how a GPU speeds up a database query.<p>Most traditional SQL databases are I&#x2F;O-bound, meaning that the cost of pulling index pages from disk into memory overwhelms everything else, and adding more CPU doesn&#x27;t do much good. Even for in-memory databases the cost of pulling a page into GPU memory is likely to be high. The calculations you do are pretty simple -- you mostly traverse arrays of pointers and do intersections and accumulations. No floating point, just increment and compare integers.<p>GPUs really shine when you can parallelize operations on blocks of data that are already in GPU memory. That&#x27;s why they&#x27;re great for graphics and games. I&#x27;m not seeing how they help with database queries over large volumes of data which cannot fit in GPU memory.<p>I&#x27;d really love to read some kind of tutorial on the topic. There&#x27;s likely some kind of magic here that I don&#x27;t see.