FPGA based correlator for photon spectroscopy

R&D Project

• Guide: Prof. Kasturi Saha and Prof. Laxmeesha Somappa, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay
• Duration: January 2023 - April 2023

This project uses UPMEM to accelerate the various operations (addition, multiplication, key switching, rotation) involved in a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme. Some hardware characterization were first carried out to find out the bottlenecks in the process and on the basis of these statistics, the processes were accelerated using the near data processing machine, UPMEM PIM.

FHE is a cryptographic scheme which enables the user to perform operations directly on the ciphertext. This is highly valuable in cloud computing where the client can encrypt the data and the computation can occur on the server side without any decryption. This reduces any data leaks on the server. We are targetting the widely used CKKS scheme of FHE implemented using the Microsoft SEAL library because it can be used to operate on real numbers instead of integers (as in the BFV scheme).

Our initial hardware characterizations showed that the operations in FHE are highly memory bound and would not be helped much by compute acceleration. Hence, a near data processing machine such as UPMEM should help in accelerating the various processes. UPMEM PIM consists of DRAM Processing Units positioned within the DRAM memory chips and next to the data to drastically reduce off-chip data movements. This improves performance for FHE (as it is memory intensive).

4. Final