Evaluation of Erasure Coding and Opportunistic Offloading Algorithms Using DPU in Distributed Storage Systems

In this paper, we explore accelerating Erasure Coding by applying the BlueField-3 DPU to distributed storage systems. First, we evaluated the performance of Erasure Coding when executed on the CPU and DPU, respectively. The evaluation results showed that the DPU had a execution time approximately 10.5 times slower than the CPU. This finding indicates that unconditional offloading is not beneficial; instead, offloading should be considered opportunistically when the CPU is busy and not be able to handle Erasure Coding tasks effectively. Based on this, we propose an opportunistic algorithm for offloading Erasure Coding to the DPU. Our future work is to refine the proposed offloading algorithm and apply it to distributed storage systems using DPUs to improve the performance of Erasure Coding.