Performance Evaluation and Modeling of Cryptographic Libraries for MPI Communications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of four cryptographic libraries integrated with MPI in HPC environments and develops models to predict encrypted communication performance across different network technologies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical comparison of cryptographic libraries for MPI and introduces performance models to guide optimization in encrypted HPC communications.

Findings

OpenSSL and BoringSSL outperform others in micro-benchmarks.

Performance models accurately predict encrypted MPI communication latency.

Guidelines for improving encrypted MPI performance are derived.

Abstract

In order for High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications with data security requirements to execute in the public cloud, the cloud infrastructure must ensure the privacy and integrity of data. To meet this goal, we consider incorporating encryption in the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. We empirically evaluate four contemporary cryptographic libraries, OpenSSL, BoringSSL, Libsodium, and CryptoPP using micro-benchmarks and NAS parallel benchmarks on two different networking technologies, 10Gbps Ethernet and 40Gbps InfiniBand. We also develop accurate models that allow us to reason about the performance of encrypted MPI communication in different situations and give guidance on how to improve encrypted MPI performance.