Patent ID: 7979491

Claim:
A method executed by a computer including a plurality of processing elements, comprising: dividing input data into a plurality of segments; processing the plurality of segments, in parallel, by the processing elements in the computer, wherein processing the plurality of segments produces a plurality of tentative sets of chunks defined by respective chunk boundaries, wherein at least one of the plurality of tentative sets includes a chunk defined by a particular chunk boundary that would not have been identified as a chunk boundary if the input data were sequentially processed by a single one of the processing elements; and stitching the plurality of tentative sets of chunks together to produce an output set of chunks, wherein the stitching comprises: creating a combined set of chunks by combining the plurality of tentative sets of chunks; and merging two adjacent or overlapping chunks from different tentative sets of chunks into a single chunk if a size of a resulting chunk from the merging would not exceed a predetermined maximum chunk size.