5 ms·

I wonder how long it will be until we see gpus used for general purposes on the server- like accelerating apache or mysql. Since this hasn't been done yet, ther

I wonder how long it will be until we see gpus used for general purposes on the server- like accelerating apache or mysql. Since this hasn't been done yet, there must be some reason it's not possible?

FooBarWidget 16y ago
If you can tell me how to parse HTTP in GPU faster than in CPU I would be very interested. Right now even uploading an HTTP header to GPU takes more time than parsing it in CPU. MySQL is heavily disk-bound. It is not CPU-bound except for things like sorting multi-gigabyte datasets, which people rarely use MySQL for. For most purposes you're better off installing more RAM than offloading computations to the GPU, otherwise MySQL has to spend all its time waiting for the harddisk.
- vilya 16y ago
  Encryption and decryption for https could benefit quite a bit, I would think.
  - FooBarWidget 16y ago
    Can encryption be parallelized? With block cipher chaining modes like CFB, each block depends on the previous block. You can parallelize encryption if you use ECB but that's known to be insecure.
    - gxti 16y ago
      Individual streams aren't parallelizable, but if you have many streams open at once you could hypothetically process them together in parallel instead of separately in parallel as it is with a CPU. Also, there are block modes that are seekable and thus could be parallelized if you had a big enough backlog, CTR mode in particular, but parallelizing individual streams is not likely to reap big enough rewards to justify the complexity.
  - wmf 16y ago
    Except Intel already put in specific instructions for that. I was surprised to discover that GPUs can accelerate SQLite http://pbbakkum.com/db/ http://pbbakkum.com/db/ and routing http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ (although you're probably better off using an NP for routing).
    - vilya 16y ago
      Now that IS interesting. Thanks for the links!

FooBarWidget 16y ago

If you can tell me how to parse HTTP in GPU faster than in CPU I would be very interested. Right now even uploading an HTTP header to GPU takes more time than parsing it in CPU. MySQL is heavily disk-bound. It is not CPU-bound except for things like sorting multi-gigabyte datasets, which people rarely use MySQL for. For most purposes you're better off installing more RAM than offloading computations to the GPU, otherwise MySQL has to spend all its time waiting for the harddisk.

vilya 16y ago
Encryption and decryption for https could benefit quite a bit, I would think.
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  Can encryption be parallelized? With block cipher chaining modes like CFB, each block depends on the previous block. You can parallelize encryption if you use ECB but that's known to be insecure.
  - gxti 16y ago
    Individual streams aren't parallelizable, but if you have many streams open at once you could hypothetically process them together in parallel instead of separately in parallel as it is with a CPU. Also, there are block modes that are seekable and thus could be parallelized if you had a big enough backlog, CTR mode in particular, but parallelizing individual streams is not likely to reap big enough rewards to justify the complexity.
- wmf 16y ago
  Except Intel already put in specific instructions for that. I was surprised to discover that GPUs can accelerate SQLite http://pbbakkum.com/db/ http://pbbakkum.com/db/ and routing http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ (although you're probably better off using an NP for routing).
  - vilya 16y ago
    Now that IS interesting. Thanks for the links!