On GPU’s viability as a middleware accelerator

Today Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are a largely underexploited resource on existing desktops and a possible cost-effective enhancement to high-performance systems. To date, most applications that exploit GPUs are specialized scientific applications. Little attention has been paid to harnessing these highly-parallel devices to support more generic functionality at the operating system or middleware level. This study starts from the hypothesis that generic middleware-level techniques that improve distributed system reliability or performance (such as content addressing, erasure coding, or data similarity detection) can be significantly accelerated using GPU support.