At Supercomputing 2022, Intel highlighted its Heracles chip, its groundbreaking hardware accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) computing tasks. That demonstration took place during this week’s IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. This convening was a big moment in the history of secure data processing.
This highly-specialized chip is designed to exponentially enhance the performance and efficiency of FHE operations. It offers speed increases of 5,000 times the performance of conventional Intel server CPUs. With its advanced and novel technology, Heracles is positioned to revolutionize the world of performing encrypted large-scale complex computations.
Heracles runs on a state-of-the-art 3-nanometer FinFET process technology, combined with high-bandwidth memory. Together, this combination allows for efficient and quick encrypted computing on massive datasets. What’s more, it addresses the increasing need for safe data management in today’s world of connected data.
Key Features of Heracles
Heracles has a world-class architecture with 64-vector compute cores, called tile-pairs, in a two dimensional eight-by-eight grid layout. Each core is considered a critical part of processing more tasks concurrently that’s helping to make the chip’s performance amazing.
When performing certain FHE operations the chip can calculate within 14 microseconds, demonstrating the potential for a highly agile process. It performs the final, crucial mathematical transformations required for FHE in only 39 µs. No doubt this remarkable velocity is thanks to its clock working at 1.2 gigahertz.
Along with each tile, Heracles uses an on-chip 2D mesh network to connect them together with wide, 512-byte buses. This architecture allows for fluidity of data transfer, creating a better data flow that maximizes the computational power available on the chip.
“It’s all about balancing the movement of data with the crunching of numbers.” – Sanu Mathew
Heracles features a whopping 64 megabytes of cache memory. It’s about 20X bigger than the average research chips made for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). Its entire surface area is approximately 20 mm2. This small form factor, together with greater flexibility and capabilities, truly positions it as a leader in cutting-edge, encrypted computing technology.
Performance and Scalability
Heracles is the first hardware solution that makes performing FHE computing tasks at scale a reality. This technology streamlines seven important processes. As a result, it is able to realize speedups of 1,074 – 5,547 × faster than existing chips. This extraordinary performance goes to show its immense usefulness across different industries that need data to be processed safely.
Intel remains committed to our commitments. This commitment has been echoed by Ro Cammarota, who directed the Heracles project until December and is now at the University of California Irvine.
“When Intel starts talking about scale, that usually carries quite a bit of weight.”
Industries are quickly adopting cloud infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI). In reaction to this, Heracles is building a commercially viable FHE accelerator that is purpose built for these real-world needs. It’s flanked by another form factor entirely, two 24-gigabyte high-bandwidth memory chips. This architecture type is typically found in GPUs that fuel AI training.
“We have proven and delivered everything that we promised.” – Ro Cammarota
The release of Heracles marks an important turning point in the computing technology world. Its capabilities hold the potential to break through current limits in data security and processing power.
Implications for the Future of Computing
Sanu Mathew likened this development to historical milestones in the tech industry:
Experts believe that the advancements brought forth by Heracles will enable a broad range of applications, helping to integrate FHE into everyday technological solutions. John Barrus noted that smaller models could effectively utilize this technology:
“This is like the first microprocessor… the start of a whole journey.”
Anupam Golder highlighted the challenges faced by FHE due to data size expansion:
“There are a lot of smaller models that, even with FHE’s data expansion, will run just fine on accelerated hardware.”
The continued development and deployment of Heracles has the potential to change how organizations think about the usage of data, privacy, and encryption technologies.
“Usually, the size of cipher text is the same as the size of plain text, but for FHE it’s orders of magnitude larger.”
The ongoing development and deployment of Heracles may redefine how organizations approach data privacy and encryption.
