Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention
Hi all, MapD creator here - I'd be happy to answer any questions.  The 700K figure was done by rendering polygon files to textures and using them as lookup tables - it ran pretty fast on the CPU so its not all the GPU there.  However if a point falls on a border - perhaps 1% of cases for say a medium-sized raster of the US - you have to do a geometric lookup as usual - which I didn't benchmark.  Probably better would be to do some tiled implementation - basically something like textured quad-trees.<p>And as I told the journalist I wasn't sure if I did the PostGIS indexing right - I feel like the quote got taken a little out of context - but the speedups were "high" to "quite high" regardless.