hardware acceleration available for Tor ? On FreeBSD ?

[John Case]

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.

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

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.
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