Evaluating the Performance of Erasure Codes

Abstract

Recently, erasure codes such as Reed-Solomon (RS) code and Cauchy Reed-Solomon (CRS) code have been widely used in distributed file system to reduce the large storage overhead incurred by replication scheme. Now, there is a new erasure code called Binary Reed-Solomon (BRS) code that can achieve better performance than that of RS code, CRS code and is available to be deployed in distributed file system. In this paper, we compare the encoding and decoding performance of BRS code with CRS code and RS code practically. Moreover, we evaluate how the performance of these codes is affected by cache size and multi-core from modern computer architecture perspective. The experimental results show that it is possible to replace RS code or CRS code with BRS code in distributed file system. These works let us have a better understanding of BRS code, CRS code and RS code and help us to make full use of modern computer to get best performance of these codes from modern computer architecture perspective.