SHA256 Compute Shader (Kernel) Written in Rust

... with application to Validating the Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

The project consists of two primary goals: 1) implement kernels that validate several blocks' SHA256 hash in the Bitcoin Blockchain in parallel, and 2) investigate using the open-source Vulkan standard as an alternative to CUDA. When compared to an equivalent sequential program run on the CPU, the open source tools were approximately 5 times slower than the sequential algorithm, and the proprietary CUDA was approximately 2 times as fast as the sequential algorithm.

SHA256 on GPU

SHA256 algorithm itself is primarily a sequential algorithm. However, for a variety of applications being able to hash many items in a parallel fashion can be quite beneficial. As an example, we specifically looked at validating the bitcoin blockchain as a benchmark. We compared the Vulkan/Rust API with a CUDA/C implementation.

Read the Full Report.

WebGPU, Vulkan, and Rust-GPU

We implemented the SHA256 algorithm in Rust and compiled it to SPIR-V using using rust-gpu. The shader was then loaded to a Vulkan backend using wgpu-rs with its Rust bindings to WebGPU.

To see more details, visit the vulkan directory.

Compile the code

Build the C / CPU, CUDA code

make -C c

Build the Rust / Vulkan code

cd vulkan && cargo build --release && cd ..

Generate a plot yourself

./plotboi.py ./bitcoin/block_data.csv

display ./docs/figs/performance_plot.png

Licensing Details

This project contains several files directly copied from the OpenSSL project (https://github.com/openssl/openssl), which is under the Apache 2.0 Licence.

The files in question are:

• c/include/md32_common.h

• c/include/sha256.h

• c/src/sha256.c