Accelerating weight spectrum calculation of linear block codes defined over GF(q) using GPU

Recently a new family of almost Maximum Distance Separable (MSD) five-times extended Reed Solomon codes was introduced. The properties of these codes were proven analytically and their weight spectra were calculated by computer for selected fields up to GF(512). Given the constrained time and processing power available, in order to make the computation feasible, several important optimizations to the process of code weight spectrum calculation had to be implemented. This paper focuses on describing techniques in Matlab and C, to be used in order to achieve a substantial (several orders of magnitude) improvement in weight spectrum calculation runtime for general linear block codes defined over GF(q). Furthermore, a GPU implementation is described in detail and compared quantitatively with previously published results.