Algorithm 994

The minimum distance of an error-correcting code is an important concept in information theory. Hence, computing the minimum distance of a code with a minimum computational cost is crucial to many problems in this area. In this article, we present and assess a family of implementations of both the brute-force algorithm and the Brouwer-Zimmermann algorithm for computing the minimum distance of a random linear code over F2 that are faster than current implementations, both in the commercial and public domain. In addition to the basic sequential implementations, we present parallel and vectorized implementations that produce high performances on modern architectures. The attained performance results show the benefits of the developed optimized algorithms, which obtain remarkable improvements compared with state-of-the-art implementations widely used nowadays.