Parallel Implementation of AES using XTS Mode of Operation

Data encryption is essential for protecting data from unauthorized access. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), among many encryption algorithms, is the most popular algorithm currently employed to secure static and dynamic data. There are several modes of AES operation. Each of these modes defines a unique way to perform data encryption. XTS mode is the latest mode developed to protect data stored in hard-disk-like sector-based storage devices. A recent increase in the rate of data breaches has triggered the necessity to encrypt stored data as well. AES encryption, however, is a complex process. As it involves a lot of computations, encrypting huge amount of data would undoubtedly be computationally intensive. Parallel computers have been used mostly in high-performance computation research to solve computationally intensive problems. Parallel systems are currently gaining popularity configured as general purpose multi-core system, even at a desktop level. Several programming models have been developed to assist the writing of parallel programs, and some have already been used to parallelize AES. As a result, AES data encryption has become more efficient and applicable. The message passing model is a popular parallel communication/synchronization model with an early origin. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the first standardized, vendor-independent, message passing library interface that establishes a portable, efficient, and flexible standard for message passing during computation. Therefore, this paper describes an implementation of AES using XTS mode in parallel via MPI

McMPI – a managed-code message passing interface library for high performance communication in C#

This work endeavours to achieve technology transfer between established best-practice in academic high-performance computing and current techniques in commercial high-productivity computing. It shows that a credible high-performance message-passing communication library, with semantics and syntax following the Message-Passing Interface (MPI) Standard, can be built in pure C# (one of the .Net suite of computer languages). Message-passing has been the dominant paradigm in high-performance parallel programming of distributed-memory computer architectures for three decades. The MPI Standard originally distilled architecture-independent and language-agnostic ideas from existing specialised communication libraries and has since been enhanced and extended. Object-oriented languages can increase programmer productivity, for example by allowing complexity to be managed through encapsulation. Both the C# computer language and the .Net common language runtime (CLR) were originally developed by Microsoft Corporation but have since been standardised by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) and the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which facilitates portability of source-code and compiled binary programs to a variety of operating systems and hardware. Combining these two open and mature technologies enables mainstream programmers to write tightly-coupled parallel programs in a popular standardised object-oriented language that is portable to most modern operating systems and hardware architectures. This work also establishes that a thread-to-thread delivery option increases shared-memory communication performance between MPI ranks on the same node. This suggests that the thread-as-rank threading model should be explicitly specified in future versions of the MPI Standard and then added to existing MPI libraries for use by thread-safe parallel codes. This work also ascertains that the C# socket object suffers from undesirable characteristics that are critical to communication performance and proposes ways of improving the implementation of this object

Learning from the Success of MPI

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface

Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations, are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms. We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance results, and review application experiences, including record-setting distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Parallel netCDF: A Scientific High-Performance I/O Interface

Dataset storage, exchange, and access play a critical role in scientific applications. For such purposes netCDF serves as a portable and efficient file format and programming interface, which is popular in numerous scientific application domains. However, the original interface does not provide an efficient mechanism for parallel data storage and access. In this work, we present a new parallel interface for writing and reading netCDF datasets. This interface is derived with minimum changes from the serial netCDF interface but defines semantics for parallel access and is tailored for high performance. The underlying parallel I/O is achieved through MPI-IO, allowing for dramatic performance gains through the use of collective I/O optimizations. We compare the implementation strategies with HDF5 and analyze both. Our tests indicate programming convenience and significant I/O performance improvement with this parallel netCDF interface.Comment: 10 pages,7 figure

DART-MPI: An MPI-based Implementation of a PGAS Runtime System

A Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) approach treats a distributed system as if the memory were shared on a global level. Given such a global view on memory, the user may program applications very much like shared memory systems. This greatly simplifies the tasks of developing parallel applications, because no explicit communication has to be specified in the program for data exchange between different computing nodes. In this paper we present DART, a runtime environment, which implements the PGAS paradigm on large-scale high-performance computing clusters. A specific feature of our implementation is the use of one-sided communication of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) version 3 (i.e. MPI-3) as the underlying communication substrate. We evaluated the performance of the implementation with several low-level kernels in order to determine overheads and limitations in comparison to the underlying MPI-3.Comment: 11 pages, International Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS14

Efficient Message Passing Interface (MPI) for Parallel Computing on Clusters of Workstations

Parallel computing on clusters of workstations and personal computers has very high potential, since it leverages existing hardware and software. Parallel programming environments offer the user a convenient way to express parallel computation and communication. In fact, recently, a Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been proposed as an industrial standard for writing "portable" message-passing parallel programs. The communication part of MPI consists of the usual point-to-point communication as well as collective communication. However, existing implementations of programming environments for clusters are built on top of a point-to-point communication layer (send and receive) over local area networks (LANs) and, as a result, suffer from poor performance in the collective communication part. In this paper, we present an efficient design and implementation of the collective communication part in MPI that is optimized for clusters of workstations. Our system consists of two main components: the MPI-CCL layer that includes the collective communication functionality of MPI and a User-level Reliable Transport Protocol (URTP) that interfaces with the LAN Data-link layer and leverages the fact that the LAN is a broadcast medium. Our system is integrated with the operating system via an efficient kernel extension mechanism that we developed. The kernel extension significantly improves the performance of our implementation as it can handle part of the communication overhead without involving user space. We have implemented our system on a collection of IBM RS/6000 workstations con- nected via a lOMbit Ethernet LAN. Our performance measurements are taken from typical scientific programs that run in a parallel mode by means of the MPI. The hypothesis behind our design is that system's performance will be bounded by interactions between the kernel and user space rather than by the bandwidth delivered by the LAN Data-Link Layer. Our results indicate that the performance of our MPI Broadcast (on top of Ethernet) is about twice as fast as a recently published software implementation of broadcast on top of ATM

POSH: Paris OpenSHMEM: A High-Performance OpenSHMEM Implementation for Shared Memory Systems

In this paper we present the design and implementation of POSH, an Open-Source implementation of the OpenSHMEM standard. We present a model for its communications, and prove some properties on the memory model defined in the OpenSHMEM specification. We present some performance measurements of the communication library featured by POSH and compare them with an existing one-sided communication library. POSH can be downloaded from \url{http://www.lipn.fr/~coti/POSH}. % 9 - 67Comment: This is an extended version (featuring the full proofs) of a paper accepted at ICCS'1