MapD Offers a Columnar Database System that Runs on GPUs

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San Francisco startup MapD has released a database system, ParallelDB, built to run on GPUs (graphics processing units), which can be used to explore multi-billion row datasets quickly in milliseconds, according to the company.

The idea of using GPUs for database work may initially seem unusual, but after you think about it for a bit, you start to wonder why no one has commercialized the idea before.

“Imagine an SQL query. Or any kind of relational operator, doing the same thing over every row of data. That lends itself really well to the vector model of GPUs,” said Todd Mostak, founder, and CEO of MapD.

Read more at The New Stack