[Beowulf] Quasi-Non-Von-Neumann hardware in a Beowulf

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 08:08:17PM -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> Yeah, I've done all of these computations and looked into various
> quantum devices and entropy based generators.  However, you'd be
> surprised how difficult it is to make a HARDWARE based random number
> device that passes e.g. diehard.  There is a deep truth here.  "Random

http://www.via.com.tw/en/downloads/whitepapers/initiatives/padlock/evaluation_padlock_rng.pdf

Support is there starting with kernel 2.6.11.

> Actually IIRC there was some effort by Intel to build something into a
> CPU or some other part of a mobo chipset, but I don't know what came of
> it.  The people who need this commercially are webvolken and encryption

It's still there in some chipsets, but you can't rely on it being there if
you don't control your hardware purchases.

> algorithms, where "unpredictable" is almost as good as "random to the
> nth bit of randomness".  Nobody uses marginally secure encryption if
> they can help it.  However, these folks are totally happy with
> kilorands/sec, let alone megarands/sec.  I need hundreds of
> megarands/sec.

http://fp.gladman.plus.com/ACE/
claims almost 2 GByte/s throughput for AES. The bottleneck will be the GBit
NIC on a PCI bus.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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