Faster across the PCIe bus: a GPU library for lightweight decompression: including support for patched compression schemes

This short paper present a collection of GPU lightweight decompression algorithms implementations within a FOSS library, Giddy - the first to be published to offer such functionality. As the use of compression is important in ameliorating PCIe data transfer bottlenecks, we believe this library and its constituent implementations can serve as useful building blocks in GPU-accelerated DBMSes --- as well as other data-intensive systems. The paper also includes an initial exploration of GPU-oriented patched compression schemes. Patching makes compression ratio robust against outliers, and is important with real-life data, which (in contrast to many synthetic benchmark datasets) exhibits non-uniform data distributions and noise. An experimental evaluation of both the unpatched and the patched schemes in Giddy is included.