SC Conference - Activity Details
A Microdriver Architecture for Error Correcting Codes inside the Linux Kernel
Authors:| Dominic Eschweiler (Forschungzentrum Juelich) |
| Andre Brinkmann (University of Paderborn) |
| GPU Applications |
| Wednesday, 04:30PM - 05:00PM |
| Room PB256 |
Linux is often used in conjunction with parallel file systems in high performance cluster environments and the tremendous storage growth in these environments leads to the requirement of multi-error correcting codes. This work investigated the potential of graphic cards for such coding applications in the Linux kernel. For this purpose, a special micro driver concept (Barracuda) has been designed that can be integrated into Linux without changing kernel APIs. For the investigation of the performance of this concept, the Linux RAID 6-system and the applied Reed-Solomon code have been exemplary extended and studied. The resulting measurements outlines opportunities and limitations of our microdriver concept. On the one hand, the concept achieves a speed-up of 72 for complex, 8-failure correcting codes, while no additional speed-up can be generated for simpler, 2-error correcting codes. An example application for Barracuda could therefore be replacement of expensive RAID systems in cluster storage environments.
The full paper can be found in the
ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society
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