A Performance Model for Reconfigurable Block Cipher Array Utilizing Amdahl's Law

Abstract

The existing research on Amdahl's law is limited to multi/many-core processors, and cannot be applied to the important parallel processing architecture of coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays. This paper studies the relation between the multi-level parallelism of block cipher algorithms and the architectural characteristics of coarse-grain reconfigurable arrays. We introduce the key variables that affect the performance of reconfigurable arrays, such as communication overhead and configuration overhead, into Amdahl's law. On this basis, we propose a performance model for coarse-grain reconfigurable block cipher array (CGRBA) based on the extended Amdahl's law. In addition, this paper establishes the optimal integer nonlinear programming model, which can provide a parameter reference for the architecture design of CGRBA. The experimental results show that: (1) reducing the communication workload ratio and increasing the number of configuration pages reasonably can significantly improve the algorithm performance on CGRBA; (2) the communication workload ratio has a linear effect on the execution time.