Computer systems with GPUs are expected to become a strong methodology for high-speed encryption processing. Moreover, power consumption has remained a primary deterrent for such processing on devices of all sizes. However, GPU vendors are currently announcing their future roadmaps of GPU architecture development: Nvidia Corp. promotes the Kepler architecture and AMD Corp. emphasizes the GCN architecture. Therefore, we evaluated throughput and power efficiency of three 128-bit block ciphers on GPUs with recent Nvidia Kepler and AMD GCN architectures. From our experiments, whereas the throughput and per-watt throughput of AES-128 on Radeon HD 7970 (2048 cores) with GCN architecture are 205.0 Gbps and 1.3 Gbps/Watt respectively, those on Geforce GTX 680 (1536 cores) with Kepler architecture are, respectively, 63.9 Gbps and 0.43 Gbps/W; an approximately 3.2 times throughput difference occurs between AES-128 on the two GPUs. Next, we investigate the reasons for the throughput difference using our micro-benchmark suites. According to the results, we speculate that to ameliorate Kepler GPUs as co-processor of block ciphers, the arithmetic and logical instructions must be improved in terms of software and hardware.
Nishikawa et al. in REF presented implementation of block ciphers in NVIDIA and AMD GPU based on Geforce GTX 680 architecture with throughput of 68.6 Gbps.
Throughput and Power Efficiency Evaluation of Block Ciphers on Kepler and GCN GPUs Using Micro-Benchmark Analysis
IEICE Transactions
IEICE Transactions
Computer Science