A system and method for performing erasure code data protection and recovery computations using simple arithmetic and data manipulation functions. Other embodiments set forth techniques for using the computation functions with a multiplicity of compact one-dimension table lookup operations. A set of assigned multi-threaded processor threads perform computations on data values in parallel to generate erasure code data protection information and to perform data recovery operations using available data and the data protection information. During normal operations, in one embodiment, threads may perform parallel computations using a small set of simple arithmetic operations and data manipulation functions. In other embodiments, the threads may also use a multiplicity of compact one-dimension lookup tables stored within the multi-threaded processor or otherwise accessible by the multi-threaded processor to perform the computations.