Crypto acceleration on multi-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems
As I've mentioned in previous entries, Sun's latest UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, which are launched today, continue to provide hardware acceleration for a wide variety of important cryptographic operations.
Acceleration is provided in an identical manner to the original UltraSPARC T2 processor - each core has its own hardware cryptographic accelerator that provides support for public-key operations (RSA, DSA, DH, ECC), bulk ciphers (RC4, DES, 3DES, AES-{128/192/256}) and secure hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256). For the bulk ciphers the currently supported chaining modes are ECB, CBC and CFB64 for DES/3DES and ECB, CBC, and CTR for AES.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 and T5140 Servers both support 2 UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors for a total of up to 16 cryptographic accelerators per system. Access to the accelerators is via the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (either directly, or indirectly via Java, OpenSSL or NSS) and the framework will automatically load balance requests across the 16 accelerators.
For both the T5240 and the T5140 the accelerators provide an aggregate throughput of up to 80Gb/s of AES-128 (enabling wire-speed encryption), and over 70,000 RSA-1024 sign operations/sec. And this performance can be delivered while the processor is largely idle and available for other processing, essentially eliminating the normally significant overheads associated with crypto processing (zero-cost security!).
