Designing GPU-Accelerated Query Engines with NVIDIA GQE | NVIDIA Technical Blog

This post introduces NVIDIA GQE (GPU Query Engine), a reference architecture for accelerating SQL query execution on large datasets using modern NVIDIA hardware. It details GQE's three-layer architecture (query, data, execution) and its reliance on cuDF and other CUDA-X libraries. Key contributions include: 1) An in-memory data layout organized into row groups and partitions for efficient transfer. 2) Pipelined host-to-device transfer orchestration that overlaps scheduling, H2D transfer, decompression, and CUDA kernel execution across concurrent CUDA streams. 3) Data transfer optimizations using GPU-accelerated compression via nvCOMP (balancing compression ratio, compression speed, and GPU decompression speed with algorithms like Cascaded and LZ4) and aggressive partition pruning using zone maps. The post demonstrates a 7.5x aggregate speedup on TPC-H SF1000 compared to CPU databases.