Paper 2023/1190

REED: Chiplet-Based Scalable Hardware Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has emerged as a promising technology for processing encrypted data without the need for decryption. Despite its potential, its practical implementation has faced challenges due to substantial computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose the $first$ chiplet-based FHE accelerator design `REED', which enables scalability and offers high throughput, thereby enhancing homomorphic encryption deployment in real-world scenarios. It incorporates well-known wafer yield issues during fabrication which significantly impacts production costs. In contrast to state-of-the-art approaches, we also address data exchange overhead by proposing a non-blocking inter-chiplet communication strategy. We incorporate novel pipelined Number Theoretic Transform and automorphism techniques, leveraging parallelism and providing high throughput. Experimental results demonstrate that REED 2.5D integrated circuit consumes 177 mm$^2$ chip area, 82.5 W average power in 7nm technology, and achieves an impressive speedup of up to 5,982$\times$ compared to a CPU (24-core 2$\times$Intel X5690), and 2$\times$ better energy efficiency and 50\% lower development cost than state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator. To evaluate its practical impact, we are the $first$ to benchmark an encrypted deep neural network training. Overall, this work successfully enhances the practicality and deployability of fully homomorphic encryption in real-world scenarios.