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Re: parallelism in a single instance of scrypt



On Thu, 8 Apr 2010 17:38:30 +0400
Solar Designer <solar@openwall.com> wrote:

> How much parallelism is there in a single instance of the scrypt key
> derivation function?  I notice that you have an implementation for SSE2,
> which means 4x parallelism (right?), but can it be extended further -
> say, to use multiple CPU cores for a single scrypt computation?

I already mentioned p, but didn't say what it meant -- p is, roughly,
the number of separate instances of the scrypt mixing function used.
Each of these instances can be run in parallel.  The paper describes p
more precisely.

>                                                                  What is
> going to happen when x86-64 CPUs with AVX (256-bit vectors) hit the
> market - will it be possible to make optimal use of them?  [snip]

Probably not.  I just looked through the AVX instructions listed in
section B.1.26 of the NASM 2.07 manual, and I didn't see any integer
addition operations on 256-bit vectors.

Robert Ransom