Application of graphics processors to database technologies

Surveyed general-purposed computing on GPUs (GPGPU) and using graphics processors (GPUs) on database processing. Divided GPU technology's development into three periods, namely fixed functional, separated shader and unified shader. Summarized the difficulties and status quo of GPGPU. For each period, described the opportunities and limitations by the architecture, and provided the corresponding general computing model. Surveyed the applications in database area, including predicates, Boolean combination and aggregation, sort, join, multidimensional index etc. By analyzing the motivation factors of GPU technology, envisioned the trend of GPGPU technology, and summarized three layers upon which to utilize the GPU technology, namely graphics pipeline and general parallel computing, interactive multimedia, graphics theory and methods. Took database technology as example to envision the trend on each layer