SHA-256 accelerated via GPU

[jozwikjp]

Greetings,
I just starting testing out StarWind with deduplication, it seems to be pretty awesome. It seems that under heavy load it requires a lot of CPU power, which seems like it would be mostly doing SHA-256 operations.
GPU's are awesome for these type of encryption operations.

Example from the bitcoin hardware wiki

A top of the line intel can get about 15mhashes per second. Compared to a ATI 6970 with 400mhashes per second.

If the hashes could be offloaded to the GPU it seems like you could increase the IO through the rough.

Any thoughts?

I am planning out a Windows 2008R2 system with 8 SSD drives in a raid 10, but I think I would be maxing out the CPUs because I hit the I/O or network wall.

[anton (staff)]

1) CPU is not a bottleneck. Disk subsystem is. Our calculations are properly parallelized (take advantage of a multiple CPU cores) and everything works in a pipeline. Hash calculation is not the longest stage of our pipeline.

2) We don't actually use SHA256