Daily tech talk.. GPU based databases

Today I will write about the GPU based databases.

For this topic I selected a picture about one of our server, which has 8 NVIDIA K80 GPU.
The most important factor is not the core numbers which also amazing, more the memory size.
In this machine we have 192GB GDDR5 memory.
This gives total 3840GB/s memory bandwidth, and 39.936 GPU cores
You can imagine, how this works with a GPU based in memory database.

First thing which I found around 10 years ago was an analytical tool which first used the GPU
It was the JEDOX GPU Accelerator
https://knowledgebase.jedox.com/knowledgebase/jedox-gpu-accelerator/

It was a good tool, but not a general use solution.

Later I found an interesting OpenSource project which was Alenka
https://github.com/antonmks/Alenka

What was the most interesting ?
It made far better result on a mid range notebook GPU compared to an Oracle T4-4 server with standard DB benchmark.
This was in 2012!!! Than no one talked about this, and most of my colleagues think I'm crazy.

After a few years I found a commercial product, which made available, and was the first which has regular support.
It was MAPD
https://www.mapd.com

This year this project made opensource, so now anyone able to test it. I can describe it with one word: Amazing!
Originally it is for x86, but immediately after Open Source release, I compiled to our Power8 server.
With one billion record if had the same performance like regular databases with hundreds.
The most powerful feature of this platform, it is not only DB it also has some visualisation, which show immediately the query results. If you put a lots of diagrams, it still has the amazing speed.

For those who interested after this introduction:
https://github.com/mapd/mapd-core

There is now a competitor, who is Kinetica.
https://www.kinetica.com

This DB used at USPS, and OIL and Gas companies. The speed compared to other in-memory databases killer.

I think this will be the future of the databases. What could change this dominance is the FPGA boards, which has far more processing unit, than GPUs. But we need to wait until these will be mainstream at Enterprises.

Anyone has also experience with this toys ? Write comments!

Great technology buddies, thanks for sharing interesting post

nice post. shared :)

You can download an explanatory eBook Introduction to GPUs for Data Analytics from O'Rielly.

Thanks! I really like O'Rielly books :) I didn't know about it!

wonderful informations

I have low information about computers and features of it. I can start with the learning with your post thanks for sharing . I appreciate it .

Hello @cuttie1979

Do you have experience with Webservers using GPU ?

Thanks for your post, I'm highly interested in this kind of topics, since i have years working building high performance servers for companies I was always thinking about the GPU power in this niche.

All the best and following you

Yes! This was also one of the topics. But I think the answer is fpga :D

Thank you for sharing such information. I'm already reading about that. I will try to perform at least basic tests, since I'm a benchmark freaky trying to reach out high performance web services.

Also if you are interesting about IT Security you can follow me.

All the best

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