The Saaz project is aimed at creating a database for scientists. The past few decades have seen lots of growth in relational databases, but this has had little impact on the scientific community. We went to bring the benefits of databases to scientific researchers whose simulations and datasets do not fit will into the relational model.
We are designing Saaz as a computational database to combine spacial data retrieval with powerful computational facilities tailored to dynamic representations of irregular time-dependent structures. The Saaz database moves computation-intensive workloads out of a querying application and into the database where they can be analyzed and optimized. To efficiently facilitate these numerical algorithms within the database, we move away from the relational model to support an imperative style of query that conserves spacial locality. This will allow scientists to focus not on their data structures, organization, or persistence, but instead on their models and computations.
We are looking at several backend compute targets, including the host CPU, and expansion cards, such as GPUs.
We are working with the Computational Fluid Dynamics group here at UCSD.
We have some preliminary benchmarks.