> -----Original Message----- > From: pgsql-hackers-ow...@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-hackers- > ow...@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Hamza Bin Sohail > Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 3:10 PM > To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org > Subject: [HACKERS] would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in > general) ? > > > Hello hackers, > > I think i'm at the right place to ask this question. > > Based on your experience and the fact that you have written the > Postgres code, > can you tell what a rough break-down - in your opinion - is for the > time the > database spends time just "fetching and writing " stuff to memory and > the > actual computation. The reason i ask this is because off-late there has > been a > push to put reconfigurable hardware on processor cores. What this means > is that > database writers can possibly identify the compute-intensive portions > of the > code and write hardware accelerators and/or custom instructions and > offload > computation to these hardware accelerators which they would have > programmed > onto the FPGA. > > There is not much utility in doing this if there aren't considerable > compute- > intensive operations in the database (which i would be surprise if true > ). I > would suspect joins, complex queries etc may be very compute-intensive. > Please > correct me if i'm wrong. Moreover, if you were told that you have a > reconfigurable hardware which can perform pretty complex computations > 10x > faster than the base, would you think about synthesizing it directly on > an fpga > and use it ? > > I'd be more than glad to hear your guesstimates.
Here is a sample project: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/bakkum_sqlite_gpgpu10.pdf And another: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/ngm/15-823/project/Final.pdf -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
