PCM: A Parity-Check Matrix Based Approach to Improve Decoding Performance of XOR-based Erasure Codes

Abstract

In large storage systems, erasure codes is a primary technique to provide high reliability with low monetary cost. Among various erasure codes, a major category called XORbased codes uses purely XOR operations to generate redundant data and offer low computational complexity. These codes are conventionally implemented via matrix based method or several specialized non-matrix based methods. However, these approaches are insufficient on decoding performance, which affects the reliability and availability of storage systems. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Parity-Check Matrix based (PCM) approach, which is a general-purpose method to implement XOR-based codes, and increases the decoding performance by using smaller and sparser matrices. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PCM, we conduct several experiments by using different XOR-based codes. The evaluation results show that, compared to typical matrix based decoding methods, PCM can improve the decoding speed by up to a factor of 1.5× when using EVENODD code (an erasure code for correcting double disk failures), and accelerate the decoding process of STAR code (an erasure code for correcting triple disk failures) by up to a factor of 2.4×.