[Beowulf] Accelerator for data compressing

Prentice Bisbal prentice at ias.edu
Fri Oct 3 10:53:01 PDT 2008


Carsten Aulbert wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> > Bill Broadley wrote:
>> >> Another example:
>> >> http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=11670
>> >>
>> >> 7zip compress: 19:41
>> >> Bzip2 compress:  8:56
>> >> Gzip compress:  3:00
>> >>
>> >> Again 7zip is a factor of 6 and change slower than gzip.
> >
> > Have you looked into threaded/parallel bzip2?
> >

If you can parallelize compression, has anyone done any work using a GPU
to do this? Maybe there's a CUDA-fied gzip/bzip2/7sip out there. IF that
was the case, a cheap video card could do the trick, assuming the
machines in question have slots/space for such a video card.

I'm googling now, but not finding anything.  :(  It was just a thought...

-- Prentice




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