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Gzip on a PCI card

Posted by michael on from the what-will-they-think-of-next dept.

steve writes "The German tech news site heise.de is reporting here (in German, of course) about a PCI card developed by the Universiy of Wuppertal and Vigos AG being shown at CeBIT, which does Gzip compression in hardware, thus freeing the CPU to do other tasks. The PCI card can compress 32MB/sec, which is more than enough to compress a 100Mbit LAN in realtime. A future version will do 64MB/sec. The article mentions that this will be of particular interest for web servers. The card should be on sale by the end of the year."

5 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Useful for netbackups too by walt-sjc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems this would be a great help to those doing backups over a LAN. Shouldn't take too much to alter a version of tar , rsync, etc. to use this card.

    1. Re:Useful for netbackups too by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Interesting, didn't know that. I just assumed it used the same code. Note that one of the cool things about open source is that you could swap out the compression code which is exactly what I was suggeting, so it wouldn't really matter what algorithm the code originally used. (of course it would no longer be compatible, but I'm also assuming that this wouldn't be an issue in this case for this application.) I normally don't use the built-in compression with rsync, instead I use the compression in ssh which I believe IS gzip.

      It would be Very cool if the card supported multiple compression algorithms. Considering that GNU tar supports bzip as well., this would definately be useful.

  2. bandwidth saving by buro9 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the key to using gzip is really not to compress at too high a ratio... a low rate of compression offers a pretty sizeable saving in bandwidth for an acceptable CPU usage... once you edge up to the higher compression levels then you pay for it in the CPU and your app slows.

    i love the idea of a hardware based gzip... but i'd start by educating the software users on the cost vs benefit ratio of their existing configuration... i always seem to find that those who don't know what they're doing are the ones that have it set to maximum compression

  3. A bzip2 version would be nice ... by geirt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I try to avoid bzip2 because it is so slow, even on modern hardware. bzip2 compresses very well, much better than gzip. A bzip2 version of this card makes sense ....

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    RFC1925
  4. Sun machines use PCI busses, too. by Vengeful+weenie · · Score: 3, Insightful
    A little late posting, but I did want to point out that modern Sun machines use PCI buses, and the Enterprise class [4000+] machines have a crap load of bandwidth through their backplanes.

    I think it's a little naive to say "Oh, my 1000 hit a day web box, running on a cheap 686 wouldn't benfit from this, so it must suck." Hey, dont get mad! You said it! :P