Hardware accelerated databases are not new things. More than twenty years ago, Netezza was founded and created a hybrid hardware architecture that ran PostgreSQL on a big, wonking NUMA server running Linux and accelerated certain functions with adjunct accelerators that were themselves hybrid CPU-FPGA server blades that also stored the data. …
For the past decade, flash has been used as a kind of storage accelerator, sprinkled into systems here and crammed into bigger chunks there, often with hierarchical tiering software to make it all work as a go-between that sits between slower storage (or sometimes no other tier of storage) and either CPU DRAM or GPU HBM or GDDR memory. …
Many programs have a tough time spanning across high levels of concurrency, but if they are cleverly coded, databases can make great use of massively parallel compute based in hardware to radically speed up the time it takes to run complex queries against large datasets. …
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