MapD is an in-memory columnar analytic database with SQL support that's built to run on GPU. We debated whether the database workload is actually I/O or computationally bound but there are instances where the parallelism of the GPU, combined with the large bandwidth of VRAM, can be quite useful. MapD transparently manages the most frequently used data in VRAM (such as columns involved in group-by, filters, calculations and join conditions) and stores the rest of the data in the main memory. With this memory management setup, MapD achieves significant query performance without the need of indexes. Although there are other GPU database vendors, MapD is leading this segment with the recent open source release of its core database and through the GPU Open Analytics Initiative. If your analytical workload is computationally heavy, can exploit GPU parallelism and can fit in the main memory, we recommend assessing MapD.
