P54: Investigating Hardware Offloading for Reed-Solomon
Encoding
SessionPoster Reception
Event Type
ACM Student Research Competition
Poster
Reception
TimeTuesday, November 14th5:15pm -
7pm
LocationFour Seasons Ballroom
DescriptionReed-Solomon (RS) encoding is a storage scheme which
offers better scalability, but requires heavier
computation, compared to other models. This presents a
problem as it requires users to purchase brawnier CPUs
than would be otherwise necessitated. However,
Mellanox’s ConnectX-4 Infiniband cards have the
capability to perform RS encoding on the HCA hardware;
removing the need for powerful CPUs to calculate it. We
investigated the performance, measured in throughput,
between these cards and Intel’s ISA-Library, with regard
to various block sizes and concurrency. We conclude that
the MLX cards encoded faster and more consistently than
ISA-L. Furthermore, the ConnectX-5 cards support the
Galois Field (GF) 2^8, this grants compatibility with
data encoded by any system using GF(2^8) or less,
including ISA-L. These cards enable users to
substantially increase encoding and decoding throughput
by using more cards; additionally enabling the use of
less powerful CPUs to achieve similar performance.
LA-UR-17-26333
