SUMMARYReed-Solomon coding is a method for generating arbitrary amounts of erasure correction information from original data via matrix-vector multiplication in finite fields. Previous work has shown that modern CPUs are not well-matched to this type of computation, requiring applications that depend on Reed-Solomon coding at high speeds (such as high-performance storage arrays) to use hardware implementations. This work demonstrates that high performance is possible with current cost-effective graphics processing units across a wide range of operating conditions and describes how performance will likely evolve in similar architectures. It describes the characteristics of the graphics processing unit architecture that enable high-speed Reed-Solomon coding. A high-performance practical library, Gibraltar, has been prototyped that performs Reed-Solomon coding on graphics processors in a manner suitable for storage arrays, along with applications with similar data resiliency needs. This library enables variably resilient erasure correcting codes to be used in a broad range of applications. Its performance is compared with that of a widely available CPU implementation, and a rationale for its API is presented. Its practicality is demonstrated through a usage example.
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) have been applied to more types of computations than just graphics processing for several years. Until recently, however, GPU hardware has not been capable of efficiently performing general data processing tasks. With the advent of more general-purpose extensions to GPUs, many more types of computations are now possible. One such computation that we have identified as being suitable for the GPU's unique architecture is Reed-Solomon coding in a manner appropriate for RAID-type systems. In this paper, we motivate the need for RAID with triple-disk parity and describe a pipelined architecture for using a GPU for this purpose. Performance results show that the GPU can outperform a modern CPU on this problem by an order of magnitude and also confirm that a GPU can be used to support a system with at least three parity disks with no performance penalty.
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