A Perfomance Study of Parallel Cauchy Reed/Solomon Coding

Abstract

Cauchy-Reed/Solomon coding is applied to tolerate failures of memories and data storage devices in computer systems. In order to obtain a high data access bandwidth, the calculations for coding must be fast and it is required to utilize parallelism. For a software-based system, the most promising approach is data parallelism which can be easily implemented with OpenMP on a multicore or multiprocessor computer. A beneficial aspect is the clear mathematical nature of coding operations that supports functional parallelism as well. We report on a storage system application that generates the encoder and decoder as C-code automatically from a parametric description of the system and inserts OpenMP directives in the code automatically. We compare the performance in terms of achieved data throughput for data parallelism and for functional parallelism that is generated using OpenMP.