Accelerating SQL database operations on a GPU with CUDA

Abstract

Prior work has shown dramatic acceleration for various database operations on GPUs, but only using primitives that are not part of conventional database languages such as SQL. This paper implements a subset of the SQLite command processor directly on the GPU. This dramatically reduces the effort required to achieve GPU acceleration by avoiding the need for database programmers to use new programming languages such as CUDA or modify their programs to use non-SQL libraries. This paper focuses on accelerating SELECT queries and describes the considerations in an efficient GPU implementation of the SQLite command processor. Results on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 achieve speedups of 20-70X depending on the size of the result set.