I have a program where computing SHA-1 is the bottleneck. This is using OpenSSL

Question

I have a program where computing SHA-1 is the bottleneck. This is using OpenSSL 1.0.0e on a 2.6Ghz 16-core Opteron where I get about 325MiB/s throughput. (SHA1 here is via Andy Polyakov's x86-64 assembly implementation using SSSE3.) If I need to go faster, what makes most sense?

+ Use multiple cores
+ Use another implementation that's faster than default OpenSSL's
+ Buy a CUDA-based video card and leverage it
+ Buy a commercial hardware accelerator

I assume multiple cores won't help me because of overhead. I don't know much about CUDA other than it seems a popular choice for SHA-1 brute forcing, but unsure if it will help when I have to hash a large file. And I haven't had much luck looking for dedicated hardware accelerators (though I'm just starting to look).

Explanation / Answer

325 MB/s is already good, i.e. you will not get much more with another implementation. Also, SHA-1 is a sequential algorithm, so multiple cores or a GPU will not help you. Specialized hardware is probably your best bet to make SHA-1 faster.

(Also, if SHA-1 is the bottleneck then you are able to move data around faster than that, which is impressive; usually, network or hard disk bandwidth is the bottleneck, not hashing.)

If you can change the protocol, you could switch to another, faster hash function. I suggest RadioGat

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