Re: hardware acceleration available for Tor ? On FreeBSD ?

[Scott Bennett <bennett@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:09:56 +0000 (UTC) John Case <case@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Scott Bennett wrote:
>
>>> - Is anyone _actually_ performing SSL operations in CUDA using GPUs, 
>and
>>> if not, how much of my free time and mindshare over the next year will 
>be
>>> spent on that fascinating question ?
>>>
>>     If they are, they're most likely not doing it under FreeBSD.  The 
>last
>> time I checked, there was still no support for either CUDA (nVidia) or> 
>Streams (ATi) under FreeBSD. :-(
>
>
>Yes, it continues to be a disappointment that CUDA is not available on 
>FreeBSD or on Solaris for that matter.

     There's no sign of OpenCL for FreeBSD either. :-(

>
>It's interesting to note that this is not idle chatter - it appears that 
>CUDA is a reasonable platform for AES in hardware:
>
>http://www.manavski.com/downloads/PID505889.pdf
>
>and further, Nvidia documentation provides instruction and sample code for 
>doing just that:
>
>http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch36.html

     Those books do have some fascinating chapters in them, don't they?
I couldn't resist buying all three of them, one by one, as they appeared
in a nearby bookstore.
>
>They specifically mention CTR mode:
>
>"The decryption for CTR can be done following the same steps. Thus we can 
>encrypt and decrypt each cipher block independently, giving us the benefit 
>of true parallelization."
>
>I'll bet ops per watt and ops per dollar are all better on the 
>purpose-built encryption hardware ... it would still be more fun to 
>connect a few quadro plex external units to my Tor node.

     Quite possibly.
     In any case, CUDA, Streams, and OpenCL are only going to be available
for newer GPU models.  I'm wondering whether anyone has written the necessary
encryption/decryption support in OpenGL, which seems to be supported these
days on almost every operating system and encompasses most programmable GPUs.
My box has an old Mobility Radeon 9800 card in it that is very much
underexercised just doing day-to-day X11 stuff.  It would be nice to get some
real work out of it once in a while.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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