Parallel search on video cards

Recent approaches exploiting the massively parallel architecture of graphics processors (GPUs) to accelerate database operations have achieved intriguing results. While parallel sorting received significant attention, parallel search has not been explored. With p-ary search we present a novel parallel search algorithm for large-scale database index operations that scales with the number of processors and outperforms traditional thread-level parallel GPU and CPU implementations. With parallel architectures becoming omnipresent, and with searching being a fundamental functionality for many applications, we expect it to be applicable beyond the database domain. While GPUs do not appear to be ready to be adopted for general-purpose database applications yet, given their rapid development, we expect this to change in the near future. The trend towards massively parallel architectures, combining CPU and GPU processing, encourages development of parallel techniques on both architectures.