Exploring utilisation of GPU for database applications

Abstract

This study is devoted to exploring possible applications of GPU technology for acceleration of the database access. We use the n-gram based approximate text search engine as a test bed for GPU based acceleration algorithms. Two solutions - hybrid CPU/GPU and pure GPU algorithms for query processing are studied and compared with the baseline CPU algorithm as well as with the optimized versions of the CPU algorithm. The hybrid algorithm performs poorly on most queries and only modest acceleration is achievable for long queries with high error level. On the other hand speedups up to 18 times were achieved for pure GPU algorithm. Application of the GPU acceleration for more general data base problems is discussed.