Gzip on a PCI card

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."

Comments

How cute but useless.

[_Eric]

The general trend in the industry goes to non-intelligent interconnections (Gigabit card used to have a processor (Alteon), they don't anymore (see latest intels)). I2O never took off because you don't really need to relieve a computer from computation when your computation power is pletoric.

On a Xeon 2.8GHz, I just got 71 MB/s for gzip.

What's the use for such hardware then?

Plus it will eat the PCI bus because data has to go out of memory to processing card, back to memory, then to network card. You triple the PCI bus bandwidth. (Not true if the compression is embedded in the network card).

Reconfigurable

[KingPrad]

This is cool - dedicated chips can process monstrous amounts of data and much faster than a general purpose CPU. So it's a good idea to let this card do the heavy lifting of compression. Of course the use extends to many types of data analysis: encryption, scientific number crunching, graphics compression.

The best idea would be to make the chip an FPGA not a specially-designed processor. Then you could load in different chip designs for whatever was currently needed. Need to do RSA encryption? The board reconfigures the FPGA for it. Same goes for Divx compression, gzip, SETI@Home, etc. FPGAs take a few milliseconds to reconfigure but when they operate as a dedicated signal processor they can leave a general purpose processor in the dust - leaving the main CPU to run the other apps, the desktop, etc.

Check out the IEEE archives and journals, searching for "adaptive computing" or "reconfigurable computing".

KingPrad