Screaming Fast Galois Field Arithmetic Using Intel SIMD Instructions

webinar

Author(s)/Presenter(s):

Ethan Miller

Library Content Type

Presentation

Library Release Date

Focus Areas

Abstract

Galois Field arithmetic forms the basis of Reed-Solomon and other erasure coding techniques to protect storage systems from failures. Most implementations of Galois Field arithmetic rely on multiplication tables or discrete logarithms to perform this operation. However, the advent of 128-bit instructions, such as Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions, allows us to perform Galois Field arithmetic much faster. This talk outlines how to leverage these instructions for various field sizes, and demonstrates the significant performance improvements on commodity microprocessors. The techniques that we describe are available as open source software.