GiST scan acceleration using coprocessors

Abstract

Efficient lookups in huge, possibly multi-dimensional datasets are crucial for the performance of numerous use cases that generate multiple search operations at the same time, like point queries in ray tracing or spatial joins in collision detection of interactive 3D applications. These applications greatly benefit from index structures that quickly filter relevant candidates for further processing. Since different lookup operations are independent from each other, they might be processed in parallel on modern hardware like multi-core CPUs or GPUs. But implementing efficient algorithms for all kinds of indexes on various hardware platforms is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a new approach that extends the existing GiST index framework with an abstraction layer for the hardware where index operations are executed. Furthermore, we provide first performance evaluations for the scan execution on CPUs and an Nvidia Tesla GPU.