StoreGPU: exploiting graphics processing units to accelerate distributed storage systems

Today Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a largely underexploited resource on existing desktops and a possible costeffective enhancement to high-performance systems. To date, most applications that exploit GPUs are specialized scientific applications. Little attention has been paid to harnessing these highly-parallel devices to support more generic functionality at the operating system or middleware level. This study starts from the hypothesis that generic middleware-level techniques that improve distributed system reliability or performance (such as content addressing, erasure coding, or data similarity detection) can be significantly accelerated using GPU support. We take a first step towards validating this hypothesis, focusing on distributed storage systems. As a proof of concept, we design StoreGPU, a library that accelerates a number of hashing based primitives popular in distributed storage system implementations. Our evaluation shows that StoreGPU enables up to eight-fold pe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Samer Al-Kiswany, Abdullah Gharaibeh, Elizeu Santos-Neto, George Yuan, Matei Ripeanu
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Graphics Processing Unit, HPDC 2008, Operating Systems, Similarity Detection