AEAS - Towards High Energy-efficiency Design for OpenSSL Encryption Acceleration through HW/SW Co-design

Entering the Big Data Era leads to the rapid development of web applications which provide high performance sensitive access on large data centers. OpenSSL has been widely deployed as a freely available implementation of SSL/TLS protocol that secures transactions over the Internet. In order to accelerate the speed of OpenSSL, many alternative encryption approaches are designed. However, energy consumption has been ignored in the rush for performance. Energy efficiency becomes a challenge with the increasing demands for performance and energy saving in data centers. In this paper, we present the Adaptive Encryption Acceleration System (AEAS), an OpenSSL encryption acceleration scheme. It provides high energy-efficiency encryption through HW/SW co-design. The essential idea is exerting the superiorities of energy efficiency for different encryption approaches and making full use of system resource through the Dynamic Management Mechanism including RequestAllocation algorithm and DynamicScheduler algorithm. Specifically, this scheme supports instruction set and hardware to process the computation compatibly by the Adaptive Control Crypto (ac_crypto) engine. Experimental results show that AEAS can improve energy efficiency by up to 933.5%, 68.8%, and 483.7% comparing with software, AES-NI and QAT, respectively.