[Botan-devel] using GPUs as accelerators

[Muzaffar Mahkamov]

The implementation mentioned in the paper used OpenGL as an API to the
GPU. OpenGL, afaik, provides limited support for general purpose
programming. nVidia CUDA, on the other hand, provides "native" API to
G80 series and later. The developer decides which functions are
executed on GPU and uses nVidia compiler to generate the code.

I believe this would yield more performance than OpenGL
implementation. The floating point operation performance is
impressive, however they do not publish integer arithmetic
performance. Time will tell, since only high end G80 GPUs are
available so far, with budget models going mainstream later this year.

I also came across a commercial solution by PeakStream that allows
running your code both on CPU and GPU, independent of the hardware.
It's supported on Linux and Windows: http://www.peakstreaminc.com/



Tuesday, March 27, 2007, 4:26:00 PM, you wrote:

> It's certainly possible, though the work so far has been
> limited. Actually the only primitive that I've heard about being
> implemented on a GPU is AES, and performance is typically quite a bit
> slower than a standard CPU. Some previous results are in
> www1.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/Papers/2004/gc_ctrsa.pdf

> Some of the existing AES implementation techniques may be helpful.
> Another obvious algorithm to implement is Serpent, as it heavily
> relies on bitslicing.

> -Jack

> On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 03:07:09PM +0500, Muzaffar Mahkamov wrote:
>> Hi Jack,
>> 
>> Recently I came across NVIDIA CUDA that allows general purpose
>> computation on the latest nVidia GPUs. Do you think it'd be possible
>> to utilize the GPU for accelerating the cryptographic functions? The GPUs
>> are said to provide highly parallel SIMD processing.
>> 
>> Here's the link to CUDA:
>> http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> Muzaffar
>> 
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-- 
Best regards,
 Muzaffar                            mailto:mahkamov at gmail.com