During the class in the spring of 2012 he learned the graphics programming language CUDA, and that opened the doors for tweaking GPUs to divide advanced computations across the GPUs massively parallel architecture.

He knew he had something when he wrote an algorithm to connect millions of points on a map, joining the data together spatially. The performance of his GPU-based computations compared to the same operation done with CPU power on PostGIS, the GIS module for the open-source database PostgreSQL, was “mind-blowing,” he said.

via Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention.