Kinetica Can Give You Accelerated Analytics
Wed, 02 Jun 2021 22:01:28 -0000
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Accelerate Those Analytics With a GPGPU Database
First you might ask what a GPU database actually is. In a nutshell it's typically a relational database that can offload certain operations to a GPU so that queries run faster. There are three players in the space including Kinetica, Sqream and OmniSci. By all measures Kinetica is the leader which is one of the key reasons we've chosen to partner with them through our OEM channel.
The first thing one might ask is what kinds of things can a GPGPU Database do for me. Some ideas for your consideration might be:
- Legacy RDBMS workloads from Oracle, DB2, Teradata, Sybase or SQL Server in an accelerated fashion with lower latency, better performance and greater throughput.
- Conduct location analytics on networks or geolocation data.
- Fraud detection
One of the coolest things I've found to date with Kinetica is that it only runs queries on the GPU where it can be accelerated. Essentially joins, computations and math operations. Queries involving a string search would be run on the CPUs. In this matter collectively the entire workload can be accelerated.
These databases run on servers with direct attach storage capable of running NVidia GPUs. In the Dell 14G product family the most common servers are R740, R740XD and R940XA servers. For 15G the most appealing are R750, R750XA and XE8545 servers. Other models are certainly possible but less common. For purposes of this article we will focus on the R750XA. This brand new server is based on Ice Lake processors and sports two sockets with up to 40 cores per socket for a maximal possible number of cores per server of 80. A pair of top end A100 GPUs can configured with an NVLink bridge to enable interlinks of 600GB/s. Systems can be configured with up to 6TB of memory including the latest 200 series optane modules. Local storage is most common and this server can house up to eight 2.5" drives which can be either NVMe or SSD. I know you're thinking what if my database can't fit on a single server. Luckily the answer is simply to use more servers. Kinetica can shard the db across n nodes.
If you want to learn more about Kinetica on Dell PE servers drop me a line at Mike.King2@Dell.com