Accelerating SELECT WHERE and SELECT JOIN queries on a GPU

Abstract

This paper presents implementations of a few selected SQL operations using the CUDA programming framework on the GPU platform. Nowadays, the GPU’s parallel architectures give a high speed-up on certain problems. Therefore, the number of non-graphical problems that can be run and sped-up on the GPU still increases. Especially, there has been a lot of research in data mining on GPUs. In many cases it proves the advantage of offloading processing from the CPU to the GPU. At the beginning of our project we chose the set of SELECT WHERE and SELECT JOIN instructions as the most common operations used in databases. We parallelized these SQL operations using three main mechanisms in CUDA: thread group hierarchy, shared memories, and barrier synchronization. Our results show that the implemented highly parallel SELECT WHERE and SELECT JOIN operations on the GPU platform can be significantly faster than the sequential one in a database system run on the CPU.