Title :
A Lightweight, GPU-Based Software RAID System
Author :
Curry, Matthew L. ; Ward, H. Lee ; Skjellum, Anthony ; Brightwell, Ron
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA
Abstract :
While RAID is the prevailing method of creating reliable secondary storage infrastructure, many users desire more flexibility than offered by current implementations. Traditionally, RAID capabilities have been implemented largely in hardware in order to achieve the best performance possible, but hardware RAID has rigid designs that are costly to change. Software implementations are much more flexible, but software RAID has historically been viewed as much less capable of high throughput than hardware RAID controllers. This work presents a system, Gibraltar RAID, that attains high RAID performance by offloading the calculations related to error correcting codes to GPUs. This paper describes the architecture, performance, and qualities of the system. A comparison to a well-known software RAID implementation, the md driver included with the Linux operating system, is presented. While this work is presented in the context of high performance computing, these findings also apply to a general RAID market.
Keywords :
Linux; RAID; computer graphic equipment; coprocessors; storage management; GPU based software RAID system; Linux operating system; graphics processing unit; reliable secondary storage infrastructure; Arrays; Encoding; Graphics processing unit; Hardware; Kernel; Linux; RAID; RAID 6; RAID TP; Reed-Solomon code; fault tolerance; graphics processing unit;
Conference_Titel :
Parallel Processing (ICPP), 2010 39th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
San Diego, CA
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-7913-9
Electronic_ISBN :
0190-3918
DOI :
10.1109/ICPP.2010.64