Revisiting Huffman Coding: Toward Extreme Performance on Modern GPU Architectures
Revisiting Huffman Coding: Toward Extreme Performance on Modern GPU Architectures Jiannan Tian?, Cody Riveray, Sheng Diz, Jieyang Chenx, Xin Liangx, Dingwen Tao?, and Franck Cappelloz{ ?School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, WA, USA yDepartment of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, AL, USA zMathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA xOak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA {University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA Abstract—Today’s high-performance computing (HPC) appli- much more slowly than computing power, causing intra-/inter- cations are producing vast volumes of data, which are challenging node communication cost and I/O bottlenecks to become a to store and transfer efficiently during the execution, such that more serious issue in fast stream processing [6]. Compressing data compression is becoming a critical technique to mitigate the storage burden and data movement cost. Huffman coding is the raw simulation data at runtime and decompressing them arguably the most efficient Entropy coding algorithm in informa- before post-analysis can significantly reduce communication tion theory, such that it could be found as a fundamental step and I/O overheads and hence improving working efficiency. in many modern compression algorithms such as DEFLATE. On Huffman coding is a widely-used variable-length encoding the other hand, today’s HPC applications are more and more method that has been around for over 60 years [17]. It is relying on the accelerators such as GPU on supercomputers, while Huffman encoding suffers from low throughput on GPUs, arguably the most cost-effective Entropy encoding algorithm resulting in a significant bottleneck in the entire data processing.
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