Intel QuickAssist: let's encrypt it in a quick way

    In our troubled world, concern for our own information security has long ceased to be regarded as a kind of paranoia, and application developers have to reckon with it - ceteris paribus, the user will choose the one that better protects his data. To make life easier for programmers, Intel has developed QuickAssist (QAT) encryption and compression acceleration technology as part of its open source program . Let's get to know her better.



    So, as already mentioned, QAT can be useful for solving the following tasks:

    • encryption of data streams: symmetric encryption and authentication, operations with the cipher;
    • public key cryptography: asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, key exchange;
    • compression: lossless data compression on the fly and static objects.

    Intel QuickAssist is a combined hardware and software solution. From a software point of view, QuickAssist is a set of APIs that implement encryption and compression algorithms on a specific specific hardware. For some popular open source products, such as zLib, NGINX, Hadoop, patches are provided that allow you to use QuickAssist, without even understanding its internal device. Any Linux family of operating systems can act as a software basis.



    Now about iron. For QuickAssist to function, the server must have one of the following hardware components:

    • either a specialized QuickAssist adapter (Intel QuickAssist Adapter), currently there are two varieties of them, 8920 and 8950
    • or a motherboard with 8920 or 8950 chipsets and Intel Xeon processors

    It should be recognized that neither one nor the other hardware component can be called widespread - those who want to try QuickAssist in practice will have to thoroughly bother with finding the right server.


    Appearance of Intel QuickAssist Adapter

    Naturally, the question arises: how much does using QuickAssist increase application performance? The test results obtained are impressive. So, the work of Hadoop in conjunction with QuickAssist is accelerated by 30%. Using QuickAssist with OpenSSL increases the number of connections per second by 6 times! Definitely, in some cases, QuickAssist can help a lot. By the way, a little hint for those who are interested: although Intel’s website is silent about this, QAT support is also available in the Intel Atom C2000 processor line .

    Finally, I’ll give you a short list of links to learn about QAT:


    Also popular now: