Throughput and Power Efficiency Evaluation of Block Ciphers on Kepler and GCN GPUs Using Micro-Benchmark Analysis

Abstract

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 205.0Gbps and 1.3Gbps/Watt respectively, those on Geforce GTX 680 (1536 cores) with Kepler architecture are, respectively, 63.9Gbps and 0.43Gbps/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.