Scope for keys and values as strings

[Utkarsh250802]

In static map, currently we cannot use Strings directly as keys, even as vector of chars(due to 8 byte key limitation), why this feature is not there, will inclusion of strings result in performance slower than cpu? even for large datasets(10M-100M)?
In a previous Q&A i saw hashing the strings, what is the solution to this if we don't want to do the hashing part on cpu?

[PointKernel]

why this feature is not there, will inclusion of strings result in performance slower than cpu?

Yes, that's correct. Depending on the GPU architecture, only 4-byte and 8-byte atomic operations are supported by hardware and that's why we only support up to 8B keys for now. Hopper and newer GPUs support 12-byte atomics, and we plan to extend our code to support them soon.

what is the solution to this if we don't want to do the hashing part on cpu?

Here's an example demonstrating how to use cuco's hash table with arbitrary key types: https://github.com/NVIDIA/cuCollections/blob/dev/examples/static_set/mapping_table_example.cu.
@Utkarsh250802 You can also check out the Godbolt version here for reference: https://godbolt.org/z/MqP11fbGW. Please let us know if you have any further questions.