Does anyone know a project which implements standard compression methods (like Zip, GZip, BZip2, LZMA,...) using NVIDIA's CUDA library?
I was wondering if algorithms which can make use of a lot of parallel tasks (like compression) wouldn't run much faster on a graphics card than with a dual or quadcore CPU.
What do you think about the pros and cons of such an approach?
We have finished first phase of research to increase performance of lossless data compression algorithms. Bzip2 was chosen for the prototype, our team optimized only one operation - Burrows–Wheeler transformation, and we got some results: 2x-4x speed up on good compressible files. The code works faster on all our tests.
We are going to complete bzip2, support deflate and LZMA for some real life tasks like: HTTP traffic and backups compression.
blog link: http://www.wave-access.com/public_en/blog/2011/april/22/breakthrough-in-cuda-data-compression.aspx