Add Hardware Accelerated Rendering (GPU accelerated Analytics)

With the advent of NVLINK from NVidia and how a few analytics groups are starting to leverage the GPU resources for database and analytics tasks - this would be useful to start reviewing/including in sql server as well as SSRS / Power BI (where applicable).
WebGL is currently used in many tools that leverages client side GPU resources in the browser. this request is more for the server level.
there's a few reasons for this.
This makes a lot of sense in SOME cases :
I. CPU and the system RAM currently in use is hitting a wall in performance improvements.
a. The GPU on the other hand is easily 4x more powerful
i. The RAM on a GPU tends to be MUCH MUCH faster than system RAM (albeit more expensive and smaller)
ii. The CUDA cores in an nvidia GPU exist in the thousands. Compared to the 32-64 cores an intel Xeon cpu has . Granted they are not as robust but they are finely tuned for analytical data. So that’s thousands of computational cores compared to 64~
II. Speaking of the cores – use cases where the current testing is showing promise :
a. Data structures that require aggregations or formulas. Anything geometric or calculation focused do VERY well on GPU silicon.
i. Current tests with some of the tools I mentioned above are showing performance increases in the 60-100x. 40million records live queried and rendered in milliseconds.
b. Any kind of spatial data. Maps in particular. Which you already touched on. GPUs are already built for handling geo-coding. By their very nature they plot and calculate distance and relationships very well any database using that gets to leverage that tech automatically.
III. The further evidence that GPU cores are suitable for this type of calculations – in my view – is from the crypto-currency activity a few years ago. If you recall, GPU’s were (and still are) being used to do calculations for crypto. That right there is a clear example that they are well suited for any type of summation/calculation/aggregation type function.

The main reason I mention this is because as we, and other enterprises scale out their PBI/SSRS/ analytics platforms it’d be cheaper to leverage GPU resources – if the tools could take advantage of the tech – instead of throwing more and more traditional CPU/RAM resources on the servers.