RayDB: Building Databases with Ray Tracing Cores

Ray tracing (RT) cores are a new type of hardware that have been actively integrated into modern GPUs. Recent studies have demonstrated that RT cores can deliver much higher performance than GPU CUDA cores and CPUs for general-purpose data processing tasks like table scan. In this paper, we propose RayDB, the first query engine that leverages RT cores to accelerate database query processing. RayDB transforms the core part of the query execution that involves multiple operators into one single ray tracing job. With a set of proposed encoding and ray launching techniques, RayDB effectively exploits RT cores to accelerate diverse workloads. Experimental results show that RayDB outperforms the state-of-the-art GPU-based query engine by up to 18.3×.