Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is in the spotlight as a definitive
solution for privacy, but the high computational overhead of FHE poses a
challenge to its practical adoption. Although prior studies have attempted to
design ASIC accelerators to mitigate the overhead, their designs require
excessive amounts of chip resources (e.g., areas) to contain and process
massive data for FHE operations.
We propose CiFHER, a chiplet-based FHE accelerator with a resizable
structure, to tackle the challenge with a cost-effective multi-chip module
(MCM) design. First, we devise a flexible architecture of a chiplet core whose
configuration can be adjusted to conform to the global organization of chiplets
and design constraints. The distinctive feature of our core is a recomposable
functional unit providing varying computational throughput for number-theoretic
transform (NTT), the most dominant function in FHE. Then, we establish
generalized data mapping methodologies to minimize the network overhead when
organizing the chips into the MCM package in a tiled manner, which becomes a
significant bottleneck due to the technology constraints of MCMs. Also, we
analyze the effectiveness of various algorithms, including a novel limb
duplication algorithm, on the MCM architecture. A detailed evaluation shows
that a CiFHER package composed of 4 to 64 compact chiplets provides performance
comparable to state-of-the-art monolithic ASIC FHE accelerators with
significantly lower package-wide power consumption while reducing the area of a
single core to as small as 4.28mm2.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure