Over the last two years large clusters comprising 1,000s of commodity CPUs, running Hadoop MapReduce, have powered the analytical processing of “Big data” involving hundreds of terabytes of information.
Now a new generation of CUDA GPUs based on the Fermi (see figure 1) and the Kepler (Kepler is due in 2011) have created the potential for a new disruptive technology for “Big data” analytics based on the use of much smaller hybrid CPU-GPU clusters.