A GPU-based Architecture for Parallel Image-aware Version Control

Version control is considered a vital component for supporting professional software development and has been widely used for textual artifacts, like source code. However, binary artifacts have received small attention when compared to the former. This fact can impose huge restrictions for projects in the game and media industry, which use large amount of binary data, such as images, videos, graphics, 3D models, and animations, together with source code. For these kinds of artifacts, existing strategies, such as storing the file as a whole for each commit or performing conventional binary delta, consume significant storage space with duplicate data, and even worse, lose vital semantic information. As a response to this problem, this paper introduces an infrastructure to support version control of image artifacts. Due to the amount of data that must be processed, we implemented our proposal using a GPU architecture, allowing a massively parallel approach for version control. The proposed architecture provides speedup over 55 X if compared to the same implementation in CPU.