On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Thom Brown <t...@linux.com> wrote: > Is this somewhere OpenCL is an option? >
Sure. Personally I wonder whether the context switching is fast enough to handle a multi-user system. In the past graphics cards have always been targeted at the idea of a single-user workstation playing games where the game wants to talk directly to the graphics card. But increasingly that's not true, with things like opengl based window managers and so on. Perhaps things have changed enough that it would be conceivable to have dozens of separate processes all downloading snippets of code and time-sharing the GPU now. The other problem is that Postgres is really not architected in a way to make this easy. Since our data types are all flexible pluggable sets of functions it's unclear whether any of them match the data types that GPUs know about. The obvious algorithm to toss to the GPU would be sorting -- but that would only work for floats and even then it's not clear to me that the float semantics on the GPU necessarily match those of the host processor. I've seen papers on doing relational joins using GPUs and I'm sure there are other algorithms we wonderful stuff we could do. But if it comes at the cost of being able to handle arbitrary join clauses it'll be a tough sacrifice to make. -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers