ABSTRACT

Accelerating Reed-Solomon Coding in RAID Systems with GPUs
Matthew Curry (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA); Lee Ward (Sandia National Laboratories, USA); Tony Skjellum (University of Alabama Birmingham, USA); Ron Brightwell (Sandia National Laboratories, USA).
22nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, April 14-18, 2008, Miami, FL.

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.