phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Compute time hardness

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Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2015 20:34:31 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Compute time hardness

On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 03:48:40PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Was I was curious about was mostly if there were any large separations
> among the leaders of the high memory fill-rate/bandwidth algorithms;
> e.g. is one doing a much better job of making use of processor
> resources than another which is otherwise close to in terms of
> bandwidth. If there is a large separation it may not matter how its
> counted.

Of course, yescrypt is supposed to win this game, with "a large
separation". ;-)  With the current default settings, it does 6
sequential rounds of MUL + ADD + XOR per 64 bytes processed.  Per my
previous message, that's equivalent to something like 7.5 32-bit ADD +
1 64-bit ADD + XOR, or let's say 9 32-bit ADDs, for each of those
rounds.  That's a total of ~54 sequential 32-bit ADDs per 64 bytes
processed.  (And in case MUL is somehow faster, there are also S-box
lookups occurring in parallel with each MUL + ADD, but in sequence with
the rest of processing.  So there's not much room for speedup here.)

What are the comparable numbers for Lyra2, POMELO, and Catena?  I guess
for Lyra2 and Catena it's 8 ADDs + 8 XORs per 128 bytes, right?

> (Rationale being that among algorithms which are relatively closely
> matched in their ability to use memory-area and bandwidth one may
> prefer the algorithm that requires more computation (however you
> measure it) per unit wall-clock as a hedge against the economics of
> attacking the memory area/bandwidth changing in the future.)

Sure.

Besides the latencies considered above, I think yescrypt also wins in
terms of its use of concurrent execution units and pipeline stages.
With current default settings, it can have 8 concurrent MULs and 8
concurrent 128-bit S-box lookups in flight at a time, per thread.

In fact, there's a tradeoff here: the latency hardening may be improved
some further at the expense of reduced parallelism.  On current and
especially older CPUs, this may be an improvement, but on future CPUs a
drawback.  So the current default settings are somewhere in the middle.

Alexander