StoreGPU: exploiting graphics processing units to accelerate distributed storage systems

  • Authors:

  • Samer Al-Kiswany;Abdullah Gharaibeh;Elizeu Santos-Neto;George Yuan;Matei Ripeanu

  • Affiliations:

  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • HPDC '08 Proceedings of the 17th international symposium on High performance distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Today Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a largely underexploited resource on existing desktops and a possible cost-effective 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 performance gains on synthetic benchmarks as well as on a high-level application: the online similarity detection between large data files.