Archives Discussions

[jwhiteman]

Hi all;

Many of you have probably have seen the article about the 25 GPU VCL Cluster that cracked all 8 character windows passwords. This got me thinking about performance in my datacenters. many of the heavier encryption algorithms  are processor intensive. I was wondering if any one out there have seen or knows about solutions to integrate GPUs into a virtual stack to offload encryption/decryption to a GPU or similar.

[Brane2]

I am hacking layman ( and thus far from being an expert on the matter), but it seems to me as a bad idea, at least with current generations of HW and SW.

Encryption is by nature very serial. You do transformation X on some block of data and it has to be completed before you can begin with transformation Y. If there were significant shortcuts, they would mean that crypto is weak. Crypto is all about transforming the data in non-obvious way, after all...