Silicom PE3ISCO3 ECC Performance Tests With Intel® 8955
General
In order to demonstrate the currently available acceleration for Elliptic Curve cryptography, Silicom performed benchmark tests for ECC computations. Using OpenSSL software, with NIST P256 and P384 (prime) curves implementations, tests were carried out, comparing software-only capability against Intel® 8955 QuickAssist Technology acceleration engine, laid as a lookaside engine on Silicom PE3iSCO3 PCIe adapter.
Test Description
Software |
Intel® QuickAssist Technology v1.6 software suite (1 instance, 4 processes in dh895xcc_qa_dev0.conf) OpenSSL 1.0.1h with QuickAssist crypto engine Linux (none) 3.6.11-4.fc16.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jan 8 20:57:42 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux |
Hardware |
Intel® 8955 on Silicom PE3iSCO3 PCIe adapter Intel® Dual Xeon® CPU E5-2670 v2 @ 2.50GHz (2 x 10 cores) |
Tests Procedure Software only (No acceleration) |
Utility command line invocation – [user@host tests]# taskset 0x3ff openssl speed {ecdhp256, ecdhp384} [user@host tests]# taskset 0x3ff openssl speed {ecdsap256, ecdsap384} |
Tests Procedure Accelerated with QuickAssist Technology |
Utility command line invocation – [user@host tests]# taskset 0x3ff openssl speed –engine qat {ecdhp256, ecdhp384} [user@host tests]# taskset 0x3ff openssl speed –engine qat {ecdsap256, ecdsap384} |
Tests Results – Software Only
Test # | Summary | Results | ||
CPU Cores | Alg. / Curve | Op/S | CPU% | |
1 | 1 | ECDH P256 | 2,718 | 1 core x 100% busy |
2 | 2 | ECDH P256 | 5,332 | 2 cores x 100% busy |
3 | 3 | ECDH P256 | 10,647 | 4 cores x 100% busy |
4 | 4 | ECDH P256 | 21,111 | 8 cores x 100% busy |
5 | 5 | ECDH P384 | 1,236 | 1 core x 100% busy |
6 | 6 | ECDH P384 | 2,479 | 2 cores x 100% busy |
7 | 7 | ECDH P384 | 4,949 | 4 cores x 100% busy |
8 | 8 | ECDH P384 | 9,838 | 8 cores x 100% busy |
Test # | Summary | Results | |||
CPU Cores | Alg. / Curve | Op/S | CPU% | ||
Sign | Verify | ||||
9 | 1 | ECDH P256 | 8,304 | 2,104 | 1 core x 100% busy |
10 | 2 | ECDH P256 | 16,627 | 4,293 | 2 cores x 100% busy |
11 | 3 | ECDH P256 | 33,196 | 8,678 | 4 cores x 100% busy |
12 | 4 | ECDH P256 | 66,175 | 17,279 | 8 cores x 100% busy |
13 | 5 | ECDH P384 | 4,391 | 1,005 | 1 core x 100% busy |
14 | 6 | ECDH P384 | 8,741 | 2,013 | 2 cores x 100% busy |
15 | 7 | ECDH P384 | 17,522 | 4,029 | 4 cores x 100% busy |
16 | 8 | ECDH P384 | 35,102 | 8,139 | 8 cores x 100% busy |
Tests Results
Accelerated with QuickAssist Technology (QAT) Using Intel® 8955 on Silicom PE3iSCO3
Test # | Summary (Alg. / Curve) | Results | |
Op/S | CPU% | ||
17 | ECDH P256 | 54,810 | 1 core x 5% busy |
18 | ECDH P384 | 30,250 | 1 cores x 4% busy |
Test # | Summary (Alg. / Curve) | Results | ||
Op/S | CPU% | |||
Sign | Verify | |||
19 | ECDSA P256 | 40,005 | 17,302 | 1 core x 5% busy |
20 | ECDSA P384 | 30,825 | 9,906 | 1 cores x 5% busy |
Conclusions
ECDH – Intel® 8955 on both curves under test (P256 and P384), surpasses 8 CPU cores (as well as 10 CPU cores) performance (see Figure 1). As a result, a complete CPU socket is “returned” to the system, for general purpose processing, while Intel® 8955 upholds all crypto work.
Figure 1 – ECDH Performance
ECDSA – Similarly, with digital signing, Intel® 8955 enables CPU cycles savings, while performing the crypto work of 4, 5, and 8 CPU cores (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). These cores that needed to spend 100% of their cycles on crypto work, are freed almost in full for general processing.
Figure 2- ECDSA Sign Performance
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