Dear Serg,
Following our little chat in IRC, I'm writing this email to explain in more
detail what the idea is. My name is Nasser GHOSEIR (Founder, CTO of Butterfly
labs), which I must note that this project is not from Butterfly Labs,
but will be a new company in Europe.
Our idea is to find a way to accelerate SQL query processing by either:
1) Creating an FPGA solution (Which will later evolve into ASIC), that has like
400 processors in itself, allow distribute calculation of some kind
2) Creating an FPGA/ASIC solution that performs large number of unrelated tasks
(such as addition, multiplication, etc) in parallel
3) Creating an FPGA/ASIC solution that allows very high-speed access to data
with some PRE-PROCESSING involved to accelerate the calculation
4) Creating a very high-speed storage solution, but no pre-processing.
An example to give is for 200,000 rows, imagine: "SELECT A+B, C FROM TableX
WHERE C > 0". If there are 200,000 records, the processor has to perform
200,000 additions (A+B).
A CPU will handle these additions one-by-one (or maybe few-by-few if SSE, etc
is used). However, an FPGA/ASIC solution can perform 1000 additions in a
single-cycle. This results in acceleration.
Now, to what extend this can be effective, or what other solutions (maybe
string processing?) can be implemented to accelerate the SQL processing is a
question to me right now. But we do have experience in
making extremely fast processors (our Butterfly Labs Monarch chip performs 400
billion double-SHA256 hashes in 1 second, around 20,000 times faster than the
best intel XEON processor can do only twenty
million hashes per second).
The project is in brain-storming phase, and we are aware that this solution
will be useful to large enterprises, or companies that have to deal with
200,000 rows in a single "SELECT" query. The idea is to integrate
some features in hardware, and then re-write a portion of MariaDB to take
advantage of the new resources. Also, it is possible that users/companies will
need to re-write their query to make it compliant.
You can reach my by mail at [email protected] or by phone at +33 6 72 17 26 19
(France).
Best Regards,
Nasser GHOSEIRI
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