Throughput and Power Efficiency Evaluations of Block Ciphers on Kepler and GCN GPUs

Computer systems with GPUs are expected to become a strong methodology for high-speed encryption processing. Moreover, power consumption is a primary deterrent for data center security on cloud services and handheld devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs. On the other hand, GPU vendors currently announce their future roadmaps of GPU architecture development, Nvidia Corp. accentuates Kepler architecture and AMD Corp. does GCN architecture. That´s why in this paper we evaluated throughput and power efficiency of three 128-bit block ciphers on GPUs with recent Nvidia Kepler and AMD GCN architectures. In accordance with our experiments, whereas the throughput and per-watt throughput of AES-128 on Radeon HD 7970 (2048 cores) with GCN architecture is respectively extremely high 219.9 Gbps and 1310.7 Mbps/W, those on Geforce GTX 680 (1536 cores) with Kepler architecture be respectively considerably low 68.6 Gbps and 471.7 Mbps/W. Next, in order to investigate this mysterious experimental result, we used our micro-benchmark suites. They cleared up the reason, arithmetic logical instructions are required by encryption processing but are eliminated from some of the processing cores in Kepler architecture, unlike GCN´s.