Is it possible to accelerate (dynamic) LINQ queries using GPU?

Question

I have been searching for some days for solid information on the possibility to accelerate LINQ queries using a GPU.

Technologies I have \"investigated\" so far:

Answer 1

The GPU is really not intended for all general purpose computing purposes, especially with object oriented designs like this, and filtering an arbitrary collection of data like this would really not be an appropriate thing.

GPU computations are great for things where you are performing the same operation on a large dataset - which is why things like matrix operations and transforms can be very nice. There, the data copying can be outweighed by the incredibly fast computational capabilities on the GPU....

In this case, you'd have to copy all of the data into the GPU to make this work, and restructure it into some form the GPU will understand, which would likely be more expensive than just performing the filter in software in the first place.

Instead, I would recommend looking at using PLINQ for speeding up queries of this nature. Provided your filter is thread safe (which it'd have to be for any GPU related work...) this is likely a better option for general purpose query optimization, as it won't require the memory copying of your data. PLINQ would work by rewriting your query as:

var result = myList.AsParallel().Where(x => x.SomeProperty == SomeValue);

If the predicate is an expensive operation, or the collection is very large (and easily partitionable), this can make a significant improvement to the overall performance when compared to standard LINQ to Objects.