Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows computing on encrypted data, enabling secure offloading of computation to untrusted servers. Though it provides ideal security, FHE is expensive when executed in software, 4 to 5 orders of magnitude slower than computing on unencrypted data. These overheads are a major barrier to FHE's widespread adoption.We present F1, the first FHE accelerator that is programmable, i.e., capable of executing full FHE programs. F1 builds on an indepth architectural analysis of the characteristics of FHE computations that reveals acceleration opportunities. F1 is a wide-vector processor with novel functional units deeply specialized to FHE primitives, such as modular arithmetic, number-theoretic transforms, and structured permutations. This organization provides so much compute throughput that data movement becomes the key bottleneck. Thus, F1 is primarily designed to minimize data movement. Hardware provides an explicitly managed memory hierarchy and mechanisms to decouple data movement from execution. A novel compiler leverages these mechanisms to maximize reuse and schedule off-chip and on-chip data movement.We evaluate F1 using cycle-accurate simulation and RTL synthesis. F1 is the first system to accelerate complete FHE programs, and outperforms state-of-the-art software implementations by gmean 5,400× and by up to 17,000×. These speedups counter most of FHE's overheads and enable new applications, like real-time private deep learning in the cloud. CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Parallel architectures; • Security and privacy → Cryptography.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables offloading computation to untrusted servers with cryptographic privacy. Despite its attractive security, FHE is not yet widely adopted due to its prohibitive overheads, about 10,000× over unencrypted computation. Recent FHE accelerators have made strides to bridge this performance gap. Unfortunately, prior accelerators only work well for simple programs, but become inefficient for complex programs, which bring additional costs and challenges.We present CraterLake, the first FHE accelerator that enables FHE programs of unbounded size (i.e., unbounded multiplicative depth). Such computations require very large ciphertexts (tens of MBs each) and different algorithms that prior work does not support well. To tackle this challenge, CraterLake introduces a new hardware architecture that efficiently scales to very large ciphertexts, novel functional units to accelerate key kernels, and new algorithms and compiler techniques to reduce data movement.We evaluate CraterLake on deep FHE programs, including deep neural networks like ResNet and LSTMs, where prior work takes minutes to hours per inference on a CPU. CraterLake outperforms a CPU by gmean 4,600× and the best prior FHE accelerator by 11.2× under similar area and power budgets. These speeds enable realtime performance on unbounded FHE programs for the first time. CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Parallel architectures; • Security and privacy → Cryptography.

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