high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Due to the high demand for secure Internet usage, an improvement of the SSL performance is needed. This paper describes a technique to improve the performance of SSL by creating a CPU/GPU hybrid proxy to sit in front of a web server to only handle the SSL overheads. This will allow the utilization of high powered GPU’s to handle the cryptographic functionality when there is a potential performance gain. Existing work demonstrates that using a GPU for cryptographic calculation can provide substantial speed improvement but few have demonstrated this with the type of AES that is required for SSL communication. Existing work also demonstrates that there is a potential to use GPUs to improve SSL performance but their work only demonstrates a benefit with a large number of connections. The system shows that there is an improvement, made possible by using the GPU when the packet size becomes large enough, or, potentially, when there are enough packets within a timeslot to overcome the minimum size required before the GPU becomes more performant than the CPU.