Home/ Questions/Q 7789971
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-01T21:27:11+00:00

I’ve been reading about Nvidia Cuda and I’ve seen some questions on SO that

  • 0

I’ve been reading about Nvidia Cuda and I’ve seen some questions on SO that people have answered where they include the comment that “your problem is not appropriate to be running on a GPU”.

At my office, we have a database that has an enormous number of records that we query against, and it can take forever. We’ve implemented SQL queries that SELECT DISTINCT or they apply an uppercase function against a value. As an introduction to Cuda, I thought about writing a program that could take all the strings and uppercase them on the GPU.

I’ve been reading a book about Cuda where the author talks about trying to make the GPU cores execute as much as possible in order to hide latency of reading data across the PCI bus or putting things in global memory. Since the memory sizes are pretty small and since I have millions of distinct words, naturally I’m going to saturate the bus and starve the GPU cores.

Is this a problem that would not receive a fantastic performance boost from a graphics card as opposed to the CPU?

Thanks,

mj

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    We’ve implemented SQL queries that SELECT DISTINCT or they apply an uppercase function against a value.

    Have you considered adding a column in your table with precomputed upper case versions of your strings?

    I’m inclined to think that if your database is entirely in RAM and queries still take “forever”, your database may not be properly structured and indexed. Examine your query plans.

    I think that, in the normal case, where your selects are neatly covered by indexes, you won’t be able to optimize with the GPU. But maybe there are things that could be optimized for the GPU, like queries that require table scans such as LIKE queries with wildcards and queries that select rows based on calculations (value less than, etc). Maybe even things like queries with many joins when join columns have many duplicated values.

    The key to such an implementation would be to keep a mirror of some the data in your database on the GPU and keep it in sync with the database. And then run operations such as parallel reductions on that data to come up with row IDs to then use for selects against the regular database.

    Before taking such a step though, I would explore the countless possibilities for datebase query optimizations that use space-time tradeoffs.

    • 0