GPU Accelerated Databases

I was reading about General Purpose GPU programming on http://www.gpgpu.org  and I started to think about how GPU could be leveraged in database technology. One use that came to my mind immediately was for geospatial and geometrical data. I’m far from being an expert in that matter, but I would think that one could offload most of the calculations to a GPU. Both raster and vectorial maps can benefit the use of a GPU since it can handle both bitmaps and vectorial data like a real champion.

 Another use that I think might work is for indexing data. If you represent data using geometrical patterns, it would be thinkable to use a GPU to perform pattern matching in a very efficient manner due the highly parallel nature of those processing units. If you combine those patterns with set theory, you could define patterns that encompass the actual data. By combining geometrical pattern, those indices would be able to determine the data that is to be included in queries involving a wide range of aggregations and computations.

I’d be curious to see with the CLR integration in SQL Server, if one could call DirectX libraries to offload some work to a GPU.

Feel free to comment on the post, I’m learning and thinking out loud here! I’ll probably be posting more thoughts about this in the coming posts. I’m already thinking about applications for data minining and OLAP data…