RTIndeX: Exploiting Hardware-Accelerated GPU Raytracing for Database Indexing

Data management on GPUs has become increasingly relevant due to a tremendous rise in processing power and available GPU memory. Just like in the CPU world, there is a need for performant GPU-resident index structures to speed up query processing. Unfortunately, mapping indexes efficiently to the highly parallel and hard-to-program hardware is challenging and often fails to yield the desired performance and flexibility. Therefore, we advocate to take a different route. Instead of proposing yet another hand-tailored index, we investigate whether we can exploit an indexing mechanism that is already built into modern GPUs: The raytracing hardware accelerator provided by NVIDIA RTX cards. To do …