Introducing the CAPI accelerated GZIP card

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The CAPI accelerated GZIP card uses a the open standard DEFLATE compressed date format, offering reduced data for storage and network traffic while not impacting most I/O traffic. The DEFLATE data format is widely accepted through zlib, gzip, Java, and other applications.

The following areas are examples of typical applications that can benefit from compression acceleration:

• Storage or transmission of large amounts of data - on an average, larger than 100MB/s
• Expensive storage with high storage bandwidth, where the compression ratio of the accelerator compared to fast software compression, yields significant savings
• Applications with a high average throughput of data to be compressed
• High peak throughput of data that software compression cannot keep up with
• Where a low latency for individual compression streams is required, and it is more difficult to run in parallel on many CPUs
• When the standard DEFLATE compression format is required for interchange, as used in GZIP, zlib, zip, or jar. Software compression methods such as LZ4 or LZS with lower compression ratio, but high bandwidth on CPUs is not an option in that case.

You can find the the CAPI accelerated GZIP card user guide here: http://ibm.biz/BdrZeV

Find out more about the CAPI Compression Accelerator Adapter in the following locations:

• CAPI Compression Accelerator Adapter (FC EJ1A and EJ1B; CCIN 2CF0){ http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/POWER8/p8hcd/fcej1a.htm
• Overview of the PCIe3 CAPI (EJ1A/EJ1B) and PCIe3 FPGA (EJ12/EJ13) Compression Accelerator Adapters: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/linuxonibm/liabt/liabtkickoff.htm

For more information about CAPI, see ibm.biz/powercapi