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Theseus: GPU-Native Query Engine

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6 pointstosh2 comments

A little hard to get too excited about something proprietary that I'll likely never see in the field. But it is cool. Voltron Data definitely seems to have a lock on where things are going, show up everywhere that's of any interest. Nimble/Alpha? Consulting there too. They're just everywhere, clearly highly respected, and even if their own stuff is proprietary they see that the ecosystem needs good interchanges & protocols for themselves to succeed, which is a not-bad trickledown from this amazing shop.

They had a VelxoConf talk that definitely is impressive as heck in terms of numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXxDNWrdEyk

It's a bit drier & more abstract, but there was a talk on Velox Wave, which is Meta's attempt at doing parallelization & segment offload, strategies for targeting GPUs. Somewhere - I think maybe Q&A or close to the end - they admit the current implementation is built around Cuda, although most of the query planning & strategies could hypothetically be applied generally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACyhL9rdv-s#t=28m48s

Full Disclosure: I'm a cofounder at Voltron Data.

This is such a good post. I'm pretty humbled by your words about us being "everywhere that's of interest" and that "we're highly respected." It's hard to see that when you're in the weeds, so I just wanted to say I appreciate it.

Regarding proprietary…I get it. I was the CEO of BlazingSQL, and we were fully OSS with an open-core model. The number of Fortune 500 customers that were deploying us at scale but not paying us in money, feedback, or testimonials was honestly heartbreaking.

When Josh (our CEO) and I were in the early days of Voltron Data, we thought maybe we could hold ourselves accountable to the open-source community with a new model, which we now call open-periphery, where, as you said, the interchanges, standards, and protocols are open, allowing companies and developers to build resilient, evolvable data stacks.

Open-periphery also means we don't have to debate what goes back to the community and what goes into the proprietary code because there is such a clear delineation. Open-periphery is our way of thinking about OSS business models, and it's the solution we came up with to ensure we can continue to invest in open-source and next-generation query engines.

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