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BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

blog.blazingdb.com

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Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#41

Post by felipe_aramburu »

Improvotter wrote: post #40
felipe_aramburu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a great question. The answer is two-fold. Early on when we first started playing around with General Processing on GPU's we had Nvidia cards to begin with and I started looking at the apis that were available to me. The CUDA ones were easier for me to get started, had tons of learning content that Nvidia provided, and were more performant on the cards that I had at the time compared to other options. So we buil…

> We also found time and time again that it was faster than opencl for what we were trying to do and the hardware available to us on cloud providers was Nvidia GPUs. Were some benchmarks done perhaps or could you provide some more low-level reasons as to why CUDA was more performant? I'm not experienced with CUDA, just generally interested. I also have to say that I am a bit skeptical of Nvidia as I have never receiv…

Nvidia loves and cherishes you (I think I don't work there). They want you to be able to do this on your laptop, your server, your super computer.

If it has been a few years I would encourage you to get your feet wet again because support has gotten alot better. It's not like 5 years ago when it was nigh impossible to get the driver installed and weird conflicts would come up. I generally recommend using the debian installer if that works for you. Rapids is meant to make data science at scale accessible to people. If you have trouble with CUDA drop by the https://rapids-goai.slack.com . There are many people there that are willing to help.

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#43

Post by felipe_aramburu »

lmeyerov wrote: post #16
samstave wrote: post #6

Can someone give me some use case examples? I read that site, and the RAPIDS site - but would like to hear from some ppl using this in prod/test and what they are using it for...

We worked with the team early on it. In turn, that means it's inside one of the powertools at gov, bank, etc. teams, even if most of the users don't quite know what a GPU DB is :) We do GPU visual graph analytics over event data (security, fraud, customer 360, ...). We use for a bunch: interactive sub-100ms timebars, histograms, etc. Any full-table compute stuff you'd do in pandas, sql, spark, etc. Any UI interaction…

Thanks Leo! We love having you all as early adopters of our tech!

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#44

Post by esistgut »

felipe_aramburu wrote: post #41
Improvotter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We also found time and time again that it was faster than opencl for what we were trying to do and the hardware available to us on cloud providers was Nvidia GPUs. Were some benchmarks done perhaps or could you provide some more low-level reasons as to why CUDA was more performant? I'm not experienced with CUDA, just generally interested. I also have to say that I am a bit skeptical of Nvidia as I have never receiv…

Nvidia loves and cherishes you (I think I don't work there). They want you to be able to do this on your laptop, your server, your super computer. If it has been a few years I would encourage you to get your feet wet again because support has gotten alot better. It's not like 5 years ago when it was nigh impossible to get the driver installed and weird conflicts would come up. I generally recommend using the debian i…

Do you use Nvidia products on Linux? Reading "love" and "Nvidia" in the same sentence feels a little bit odd because the general sentiment for Nvidia on the Linux community is "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". If I remember correctly Torvalds himself named it the worst hardware company they had to deal with.

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#45

Post by dikei »

esistgut wrote: post #44
felipe_aramburu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia loves and cherishes you (I think I don't work there). They want you to be able to do this on your laptop, your server, your super computer. If it has been a few years I would encourage you to get your feet wet again because support has gotten alot better. It's not like 5 years ago when it was nigh impossible to get the driver installed and weird conflicts would come up. I generally recommend using the debian i…

Do you use Nvidia products on Linux? Reading "love" and "Nvidia" in the same sentence feels a little bit odd because the general sentiment for Nvidia on the Linux community is "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". If I remember correctly Torvalds himself named it the worst hardware company they had to deal with.

Linus Torvalds's kernel developer point of view might be very different from the majority of users'. For the end users, they just need to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers and everything just works.

For a long time, Nvidia was the best option for 3D graphics on Linux. ATI/AMD had terrible drivers (fglrx/Catalyst), Intel had abysmal performance.

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#46

Post by craftyguy »

felipe_aramburu wrote: post #17
tombert wrote: post #12

This seems pretty cool, and I'll probably play with this at some point, but sadly literally all of my GPUs are AMD or Intel at this point. I'm sure you had a good reason, so I'm genuinely curious to why CUDA was chosen instead of something like OpenCL? (I'll add my typical disclaimer that I'm not saying this as some passive-aggressive way to criticize; I'm genuinely curious to the reasoning behind the choice.)

Thats a great question. The answer is two-fold. Early on when we first started playing around with General Processing on GPU's we had Nvidia cards to begin with and I started looking at the apis that were available to me. The CUDA ones were easier for me to get started, had tons of learning content that Nvidia provided, and were more performant on the cards that I had at the time compared to other options. So we buil…

> blazingsql is part of a greater ecosystem

But now blazingsql is part of an ecosystem within a walled garden fully dependent upon the stability of a single company.

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#47

Post by throwaway082729 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #9
bsamuels wrote: post #7

What kind of benefits does CUDA bring to databases? I've never heard of running a database on a GPU before. Couldn't find anything on their homepage other than comparison with a few other db options

Check out https://www.omnisci.com/learn/resources/gpu-database In summary, you get snappy, interactive query speeds on large data sets. I've ran that locally and the results are pretty amazing compared to Postgres or even Tableau in-memory. I'm personally more excited about GPUs in stream processing; its just quite a natural fit: https://github.com/rapidsai/cudf

Isn't the speed bottlenecked by the storage speed. Is the data fully loaded into memory first?

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#48

Post by tmostak »

throwaway082729 wrote: post #47
reilly3000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out https://www.omnisci.com/learn/resources/gpu-database In summary, you get snappy, interactive query speeds on large data sets. I've ran that locally and the results are pretty amazing compared to Postgres or even Tableau in-memory. I'm personally more excited about GPUs in stream processing; its just quite a natural fit: https://github.com/rapidsai/cudf

Isn't the speed bottlenecked by the storage speed. Is the data fully loaded into memory first?

OmniSci transparently caches data across the memory of the CPUs and GPUs on a server, so after the initial read, it is likely that the data for subsequent queries will be in memory.

We've also optimized our storage formats and multithreaded our disk reads, such that we can easily hit many gigabytes per second on flash storage. Plus, new persistent memory technologies like Intel Optane will enable even more instant reads from "cold" storage.

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#49

Post by lmeyerov »

esistgut wrote: post #44
felipe_aramburu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia loves and cherishes you (I think I don't work there). They want you to be able to do this on your laptop, your server, your super computer. If it has been a few years I would encourage you to get your feet wet again because support has gotten alot better. It's not like 5 years ago when it was nigh impossible to get the driver installed and weird conflicts would come up. I generally recommend using the debian i…

Do you use Nvidia products on Linux? Reading "love" and "Nvidia" in the same sentence feels a little bit odd because the general sentiment for Nvidia on the Linux community is "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". If I remember correctly Torvalds himself named it the worst hardware company they had to deal with.

We exclusively do Nvidia/Linux.

With nvidia-docker (multi-year effort at this point) and AMIs, esp. the era of ML, this is a non-issue for 80% of our users. The other 20% struggle even without the GPUs. ML is a thing and GPUs run it, so the community has come together here.

Linux laptops remain a mess in general tho, which is annoying for non-cloud dev =/

Re: BlazingSQL is Now Open Source

#50

Post by rrss »

hobofan wrote: post #39
en4bz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA has two APIs: 1. The runtime api (libcudart.so) 2. The driver api (libcuda.so). The driver api is very close to the opencl api and is very low level. Most people use the CUDA runtime api which is vastly more convenient. The main difficulty with OpenCl and the driver api is that you have to manually load GPU code onto the device which then returns a handle. You generally have to load the code onto every device wh…

> The driver api is very close to the opencl api and is very low level. They are only realistically comparable from OpenCL 2.0 onwards. But no NVIDIA card supports anything beyond 1.2, and with that decision they basically killed OpenCL.

FWIW ROCm, which is what AMD has indicated they will be investing in moving forward, doesn't support OpenCL 2.0 either.
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