phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Argon2 CPU/GPU benchmarks

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Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 16:57:08 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Argon2 CPU/GPU benchmarks

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 03:13:09PM +0200, Kriszti??n Pint??r wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 3:03 PM, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> 
> > For 2i, the best result is for Titan X: 6301/2480 = 2.54 times faster
> > than the CPU.
> >
> > For 2d, the best result is for the old TITAN: 11715/7808 = 1.5 times
> > faster than the CPU.
> 
> so far, i'm not convinced that data dependent access worth the
> increased timing risk.

Yes, from these two results it's not convincing.  I expect the
difference to be far greater when a MAXFORM chain is added (it should
then be close to the difference between Argon2i and yescrypt, which for
the GPU implementations so far is 5x to 10x), and that's only possible
with data dependent access (since MAXFORM itself uses data dependent
S-box lookups).  Maybe that's a reason to exclude the data dependent yet
MAXFORM-lacking version.  Data dependent accesses provide most advantage
when they are rapid and their parallelism within one instance is low.

(A data independent replacement for MAXFORM is possible, even if less
effective - but we haven't even discussed that yet.  So it's non-PHC.)

> although, argon uses a randomish access pattern
> in i mode too, so maybe it leaves space for significant optimization
> not done yet?

We're already taking advantage of coalescing, for all block lookups in
2i (since it's the same order across concurrent instances), and for the
initial writes in 2d.  Also, 1 KB blocks are pretty large, and it's
sequential access within each block.  Like I said before, something
like MAXFORM is needed to have a GPU-unfriendly random access pattern.

> do you plan to do some clever pre-reading?

There's not a lot of cache or local memory on GPUs to prefetch to, given
how many concurrent instances need to be run.  That said, I think there
is in fact room for some prefetching, possibly just of portions of a
block as computation on the previous block is being finished.  (IIRC,
with Argon2 specifically, this may also be possible for 2d, starting
after 9 out of 16 BLAKE2b's.  Not the case for (ye)scrypt.)  We're not
taking advantage of this yet, and we have no immediate plans to do so,
in part because I think there are still bigger opportunities for
optimization:

I mentioned the register spills and the code size issue.  We need to
make our memory accesses explicit (and see if we can optimize them)
rather than just let the compiler spill.  Also, for the original Argon2,
parallel computation of several BLAKE2b's may be implemented, even if
non-trivial to do under the SIMT model, requiring use of local memory to
pass the results much like we've seen for the BSTY mining yescrypt
implementation discussed in here recently.

Alexander