GPU-Based Decompression for the 842 Algorithm

In an age of ever-growing data volumes, lossless data compression is unarguably one of the most relevant techniques to handle vast data sets. To facilitate high throughput compression, modern IBM POWER CPUs provide hardware acceleration for the proprietary 842 compression algorithm. The 842 algorithm is optimized for main memory compression, and a software-based implementation of the algorithm is available as a part of the Linux kernel. Even though GPU-equipped computers are vital for many of todays data intensive applications, GPUs have thus far been unable to interoperate with 842-compressed data due to the lack of GPU-based decompressors. The main contribution of this paper is to fill this gap by providing optimized implementations for 842 decompression in both CUDA and OpenCL. We demonstrate that GPU-based decompression provides 4.5-9.5x speed-up on integrated GPUs and 30-34x speed-up on dedicated GPUs when compared to software-based decompression on CPUs for various test systems. Test systems range from energy-efficient SoC-based hardware with integrated GPUs to high end workstations and servers with dedicated GPUs.