OpenMP and POSIX threads implementation of Jerasure 2.0

Abstract

In shared memory multiprocessor architectures, threads can be used to implement parallelism. POSIX threads (pthreads) is a low-level bare-bones programming interface for working with threads. Therefore, we have extremely fine-grained control over thread management (create/join/etc), mutexes, and so on. On the other hand, openMP, as a shared-memory standard, is much higher level and portable interface which makes it easier to use multi-threading capability and obtain satisfactory performance improvements. Since pthreads is more flexible, it helps programmers gain more control on performance optimizations. Jerasure 2.0 erasure coding library has encoding/decoding engines which comprise independent "for" loop iterations and hence possess huge potential for multi-threaded processing. In this short paper, we investigate multi-threaded implementations of encoder/decoder pair of Jerasure 2.0 using two different technologies: OpenMP and pthreads. We constrain our changes to a minimum possible and compare the pure encoding/decoding performance with respect to each other as well as against that of the original single-threaded version by running them on two different server systems.