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/O-bound, meaning that the cost of pulling index pages from disk into memory overwhelms everything else, and adding more CPU doesn'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's why they're great for graphics and games. I'm not seeing how they help with database queries over large volumes of data which cannot fit in GPU memory.<p>I'd really love to read some kind of tutorial on the topic. There's likely some kind of magic here that I don't see.