phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] escrypt memory access speed (Re: [PHC] Reworked KDF available on github for feedback: NOELKDF)

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Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 21:52:32 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] escrypt memory access speed (Re: [PHC] Reworked KDF available on github for feedback: NOELKDF)

On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 09:01:20PM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> So r=32 (4 KB) appears optimal in this test.
> 
> r=32 and Salsa20 rounds count reduced to 1:
> 
> real    0m5.362s
> user    0m39.046s
> sys     0m2.588s
> 
> 2*3*10*2^30/10^9/5.362 = ~12 GB/s
> 
> I suspect that some of the memory bandwidth might be wasted on reading
> from to-be-written-to memory locations into cache, before the
> corresponding cache lines are finally complete with the newly written
> data and are written out back to memory.  In fact, in the tests above I
> have prefetch instructions on to-be-written locations.  With those
> instructions removed (leaving prefetches only for reads, not for
> writes), the speed is slightly lower, which sort of suggests that such
> unneeded-by-the-algorithm fetches are happening anyway.

Turns out that with the settings above, the prefetches of to-be-written
locations were no longer beneficial (they were with r=8 and 2+ rounds).
Without them:

real    0m5.259s
user    0m38.106s
sys     0m2.684s

... and changing the Salsa20 outputs order (as I suggested in another
posting) doesn't make a difference.  That's still with gcc-generated
code, so the writes are not very tightly packed together and the order
of them is not always the same (there are several instances of Salsa20
due to the specialized BlockMix'es and the inlining and unrolling).

For comparison, without prefetches for the desirable reads as well (that
is, without any prefetches at all):

real    0m5.501s
user    0m40.167s
sys     0m2.596s

So these remaining prefetches are helpful.

Curiously, with 2 MB pages and on a bigger machine (and with bigger
memory allocation), the effect of prefetches is much more noticeable
(around 20% vs. the mere 5% seen here).

Alexander