Copyright Notice:

The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Publications of SPCL

M. Chrapek, S. Shen, P. Iff, T. Chen, M. Khalilov, M. Copik, M. Besta, a. Torsten Hoefler:

 SecPerf: Demystifying Cost of Confidential HPC

(In Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Interational Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, presented in New Orleans, LA, USA, IEEE Press, May 2026)

Abstract

Confidential Computing (CC) is becoming a de facto security standard in data centers, as evidenced by the growing number of hardware platforms that offer CC capabilities. CC addresses the needs of applications that process sensitive data across fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), finance, and healthcare. As we observe the convergence of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), confidential HPC (cHPC) is becoming increasingly crucial for meeting the performance requirements of these compute-intensive workloads. Yet, the current understanding of end-to-end performance and cost trade-offs of cHPC’s hardware remains unclear, despite being essential for the broad adoption and design of cHPC systems. We address this gap by introducing SecPerf, the first performance benchmarking platform tailored explicitly to secure cHPC solutions. Since performance is directly tied to the guarantees provided, SecPerf introduces a taxonomy of security protections that clarifies what is offered at what cost. SecPerf also categorizes the abundant security hardware in modern HPC nodes and supports extensibility by leveraging the Docker framework. We demonstrate SecPerf’s potential by evaluating the performance and cost of primitives, secure networking, offloading, computing, and acceleration on state-of-the-art hardware across 25 algorithms, 18 network primitives, and configuration variants of 29 modern applications. Our results highlight key performance bottlenecks and deepen understanding of the cost of cHPC. By providing a unified benchmarking platform and empirical insights, SecPerf lays the groundwork for the future development and adoption of cHPC.

Documents

 

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chrapek2026secperf,
  author={Marcin Chrapek and Siyuan Shen and Patrick Iff and Tiancheng Chen and Mikhail Khalilov and Marcin Copik and Maciej Besta and and Torsten Hoefler},
  title={{SecPerf: Demystifying Cost of Confidential HPC}},
  year={2026},
  month={05},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Interational Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium},
  location={New Orleans, LA, USA},
  publisher={IEEE Press},
}