| Abstract: | Reed–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. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
