EC-Bench: Benchmarking Onload and Offload Erasure Coders on Modern Hardware Architectures

Various Erasure Coding (EC) schemes based on hardware accelerations have been proposed in the community to leverage the advanced compute capabilities on modern data centers, such as Intel ISA-L Onload EC coders and Mellanox InfiniBand Offload EC coders. These EC coders can play a vital role in designing next-generation distributed storage systems. Unfortunately, there does not exist a unified and easy way for distributed storage systems researchers and designers to benchmark, measure, and characterize the performance of these different EC coders. In this context, we propose a unified benchmark suite, called EC-Bench, to help the users to benchmark both onload and offload EC coders on modern hardware architectures. EC-Bench provides both encoding and decoding benchmarks with tunable parameter support. A rich set of metrics, including latency, actual and normalized throughput, CPU utilization, and cache pressure, can be reported through EC-Bench. Evaluations with EC-Bench demonstrate that hardware-optimized offload coders (e.g. Mellanox-EC) have lower demands on CPU and cache compared to onload coders, and highly optimized onload coders (e.g., Intel ISA-L) outperform offload coders for most configurations.