high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Current video cards (GPUs – Graphics Processing Units) are very programmable, have become much more powerful than the CPUs and they are very affordable. In this paper, we present an implementation for the AES algorithm using Direct3D 10 certified GPUs. The graphics API Direct3D 10 is the first version that allows the use of integer operations, making from the traditional GPUs (that works only with floating point numbers), General Purpose GPUs that can be used for a large number of algorithms, including encryption. We present the performance of the symmetric key encryption algorithm – AES, on a middle range GPU and on a middle range quad core CPU. On the testing system, the developed solution is almost 3 times faster on the GPU than on one single core CPU, showing that the GPU can perform as an efficient cryptographic accelerator.