Exploring the design space of a gpu-aware database architecture

Abstract

The vast amount of processing power and memory bandwidth provided by modern graphics cards make them an interesting platform for data-intensive applications. Unsurprisingly, the database research community has identified GPUs as effective co-processors for data processing several years ago. In the past years, there were many approaches to make use of GPUs at different levels of a database system. In this paper, we summarize the major findings of the literature on GPU-accelerated data processing. Based on this survey, we present key properties, important trade-offs and typical challenges of GPU-aware database architectures, and identify major open research questions.