SOLUTION BRIEF

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ................................................ 1
What is OpenSSL? ................................................... 2
What is Intel® QuickAssist Technology? ................. 2

Supermicro GrandTwin™

Testing Environment .............................................. 2
Test Results: ............................................................ 3
Raw Test Results ..................................................... 4

Executive Summary

Significance of Results ............................................ 4

Supermicro’s GrandTwin servers, the latest entry in the hyperconverged product line, provide a modular system architecture in aSummary ................................................................. 5
hyper-converged platform. These servers enable companies to achieve
high scalability and speed using the latest CPU, memory, and I/O technologies. In addition, it provides companies with theperformance they need and the flexibility to adapt to the requirements of any application. To demonstrate the exceptional
capabilities of GrandTwin for cryptographic algorithms, Supermicro and Intel conducted an OpenSSL benchmark test combinedwith Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT). This test showed remarkable results, demonstrating significant improvementsof up to 33.23 times increase in performance in cryptographic algorithms when Intel® QAT was enabled. This feature highlights
GrandTwin as a high-performance, cost-effective solution for customers seeking to optimize their computing power while
minimizing their footprint. Additionally, the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors will feature a built-in Intel® QAT accelerator
that is expected to outperform servers based on the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and Supermicro will conduct a
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© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reservedApril, 2023

1

with an AIOM (OCP 3.0) card and different types of I/O modules to give customers the flexibility to customize the system to aspecific network requirement.
This system is optimized for virtualization, cloud, hosting, content delivery, hyper-scale/hyper-converged, and other generalpurpose computing workloads. The latest Supermicro X13 GrandTwin has been enhanced with the latest 4th Gen Intel® Xeon
Scalable processor, enabling even faster processing speeds that can be optimized for a wide range of workloads. With its builtin acceleration capabilities, this new processor offers an improved performance that can help boost application performance,productivity, and efficiency across various applications.

What is OpenSSL?
OpenSSL is an open-source software library that implements the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS)
protocols and provides a full-length general-purpose cryptography library. Therefore, anyone interested in securing thecommunication between clients and servers may benefit from using OpenSSL to benchmark performance.

What is Intel® QuickAssist Technology?
Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) is an acceleration engine that significantly increases the performance and efficiencyof standard platform solutions in the cloud, networking, big data, and storage by providing a framework for accelerators
supporting software and hardware offload of popular cryptography, hash public key and compression/decompression
algorithms. As a result, applications utilizing Intel® QAT will see significantly reduced CPU utilization and greatly increased
performance for encryption, secure client tunnels, and/or secure storage compression.
Intel® Quick Assist Technology has been expanded to provide software-based acceleration of cryptographic operations throughinstructions in the Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) family. This software-based acceleration has been
incorporated into the Intel® QAT Engine for OpenSSL. This dynamically loadable module uses the OpenSSL framework, allowing
administrators to add this capability to OpenSSL without having to rebuild or replace their existing OpenSSL libraries. Whencombined, Intel® QuickAssist Technology and OpenSSL work together to provide fast and more secure encryption anddecryption performance.
Supermicro and Intel ran OpenSSL Speed performance testing on a Supermicro X12 GrandTwin system showing performancegains when Intel® QuickAssist Technology software engine is enabled. These results demonstrate that organizations can benefit
from increased performance and enhanced security for their encryption and decryption operations when Intel’s technology isused on a highly versatile Supermicro platform.

Testing Environment
In the Supermicro’s test lab, engineers ran an OpenSSL Speed test on the Supermicro SYS-210GT-HNTF GrandTwin system. Theplatform used an Intel® Xeon Scalable 6312U processor running at 2.4 GHz, 512GB DDR4 memory, 480GB SSD, and Ubuntu 20.04
LTS operating system. In addition, both Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost were enabled.

© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reservedApril, 2023

2Test Results:
Supermicro achieved significant performance gains in the tests by enabling the Intel® QuickAssist Technology engine.
Improvements up to 33.23x were observed compared to our baseline across all the tests.
The most substantial performance gains were observed in more secure algorithms, which tend to be more compute intensive.
The increased performance of these algorithms over less secure ones can be quite significant. For example, our baseline, nonQAT test for ECDSA p384 (384 bit) achieved 1,253.4 signs/sec. However, when we enabled the Intel® QAT software engine, theperformance increased drastically, achieving 41,649.7 signs/sec, which is 33.23x more than the baseline. Similarly, ECDH p384
baseline achieved 1,317 ops/sec, then 17,752.6 ops/sec with Intel® QAT software engine enabled, a 13.48x performance
improvement over the baseline test.
Overall, the Intel® Quick Assist Technology is highly effective in handling cryptographic workloads and delivering impressive
performance gains, as summarized in the plots below:

RSA Algorithm

ECDH Algorithm

12000

80000
9541.1

10000

70321.7

70000

ops/sec

sign/sec

60000
8000
6000
4000

3433.41843.1

2000

559.6

1151.8
252.5

50000
40000
30000

20326

17752.6

20000

10000

1317

00
RSA 2048
Baseline

RSA 3072

ECDH p256

RSA 4096

BaselineIntel QAT Engine for OpenSSL© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reservedApril, 2023

ECDH p384

Intel QAT Engine for OpenSSL

3ECDSA Algorithm

AES Algorithm

14000016000000
117277.912000080000
47101.941649.7

40000

kB/secsigns/sec

11280160.09

12000000

10000060000

13558233.99

14000000
10000000
8000000

6488301.57

6000000

5602071.89

4000000

20000

1253.42000000

00
ECDSA p256
Baseline

ECDSA p384

AES-128-GCM

Intel QAT Engine for OpenSSL

Baseline

AES-256-GCM

Intel QAT Engine for OpenSSL

Raw Test Results

Significance of Results
OpenSSL is an open-source and widely used cryptography library that provides cryptographic functions for various applications
such as web servers, VPNs, and software encryption. Getting good results for OpenSSL and then combining OpenSSL with Intel®
QAT for even better results is critical to ensure the reliability and security of these applications in Supermicro GrandTwin.
Cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL are used by millions of websites worldwide, and a good performance can significantly
impact the user experience. Therefore, these benchmark results assure users and industries that their data is protected solidlyand efficiently.

© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reservedApril, 2023

4Intel® Quick Assist Technology is an accelerator engine that improves the performance of cryptographic algorithms. Enabling
this accelerator to OpenSSL and improving the benchmark results give us insights into the speed and efficiency these
cryptographic algorithms can reach in a real-world application with a reliable GrandTwin system. For example, Intel® QAT canhelp improve the performance of digital signature generation and verification, which is widely used in the financial industry.
As the market evolves with new technologies and the volume of data and transactions grows, security and data protection must
keep up with the increasing demand. Security and data protection are essential for everyone, especially industries that need toprotect sensitive data and information from the outside world. For Supermicro, providing the latest, most secure environments
is very important.
Significant benchmark results can be important for various markets to show cryptographic functions' reliability, security, andperformance. Some of these markets include:
1. Finance: Cryptography is critical for this market to secure financial transactions and sensitive data such as bank accounts,credit card numbers, and personal information.
2. Healthcare: This market relies on cryptography to protect patient’s personal information and records.
3. Government: This market uses cryptography to secure classified data and other intelligence gatherings.
4. E-commerce: The increasing number of users makes cryptography critical for this market to secure transactions, credit card
numbers, and other personal information from users.

Summary
Security is an extremely important consideration in today’s world. Intel® Quick Assist Technology can significantly increase thenumber of encrypted connections in choosing more secure cryptography algorithms. When used with the Supermicro
GrandTwin, significant performance gains are achieved, resulting in decreased processing time with no additional cost to theend user. Our reliable GrandTwin platform provides an efficient foundation for real-world applications that demand high-speed
cryptographic functions. When combined with OpenSSL and Intel® QAT, the results are remarkable. We have achieved
significant improvements in the performance of widely used cryptographic algorithms.
Supermicro’s GrandTwin, combined with Intel® Quick Assist Technology, provides the efficiency that applications heavily relyon, even as user demands and data encryption and decryption keep increasing. The resulting boost in speed and security means
businesses and organizations can confidently manage large-scale data processing and financial transactions, knowing that
reliable cryptographic solutions protect their data. Users of both 3rd and 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can takeadvantage of this power. The newest improvements and higher performance gains are expected on the X13 GrandTwin
platforms featuring 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® QAT built-in acceleration. This combination provides apowerful, low-cost solution to the most secure cryptography environments.

© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reserved

April, 2023

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For More Information:
Supermicro X13 GrandTwin – https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/grandtwin
Intel® Quick Assist Technology - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-quick-assisttechnology-overview.html© 2023 Copyright Super Micro Computer, Inc. All rights reserved

April, 2023

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