Arbitrary dimension Reed-Solomon coding and decoding for extended RAID on GPUs

Abstract

Reed-Solomon coding is a method of generating arbitrary amounts of checksum information from original data via matrix-vector multiplication in finite fields. Previous work has shown that CPUs are not well-matched to this type of computation, but recent graphical processing units (GPUs) have been shown through a case study to perform this encoding quickly for the 3 + 3 (three data + three parity) case. In order to be utilized in a true RAID-like system, it is important to understand how well this computation can scale in the number of data disks supported. This paper details the performance of a general Reed-Solomon encoding and decoding library that is suitable for use in RAID-like systems. Both generation and recovery are performance-tested and discussed.