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Silicom PE3ISCO3 ECC Performance Tests With Intel® 8955

avatar July 11, 2016

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.

ECDH Performance

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.

ECDSA

Figure 2- ECDSA Sign Performance

 

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