PErasure: A parallel Cauchy Reed-Solomon coding library for GPUs

Abstract

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In recent years, erasure coding has been adopted by large-scale cloud storage systems to replace data replication. With the increase of disk I/O throughput and network bandwidth, the speed of erasure coding becomes one of the key system bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose to offload the task of erasure coding to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Specifically, we have designed and implemented PErasure, a parallel Cauchy Reed-Solomon (CRS) coding library. We compare the performance of PErasure with that of two state-of-the-art libraries: Jerasure (for CPUs) and Gibraltar (for GPUs). Our experiments show that the raw coding speed of PErasure on a $500 Nvidia GTX780 card is about 10 times faster than that of multithreaded Jerasure on a quad-core modern CPU, and 2-4 times faster than Gibraltar on the same GPU. PErasure can achieve up to 10GB/s of overall encoding speed using just a single GPU for a large storage system that can withstand up to 8 disk failures.