Compression library using Nvidia's CUDA

Xn0vv3r picture Xn0vv3r · Jan 19, 2009 · Viewed 40.4k times · Source

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?

Answer

Alexander Azarov picture Alexander Azarov · Apr 22, 2011

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