Parallel Arbitrary-precision Integer Arithmetic

Abstract

Arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic computations are driven by applications in solving systems of polynomial equations and public-key cryptography. Such computations arise when high precision is required (with large input values that fit into multiple machine words), or to avoid coefficient overflow due to intermediate expression swell. Meanwhile, the growing demand for faster computation alongside the recent advances in the hardware technology have led to the development of a vast array of many-core and multi-core processors, accelerators, programming models, and language extensions (e.g. CUDA, OpenCL, and OpenACC for GPUs, and OpenMP and Cilk for multi-core CPUs). The massive computational power of parallel processors makes them attractive targets for carrying out arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic. At the same time, developing parallel algorithms, followed by implementing and optimizing them as multi-threaded parallel programs imposes a set of challenges. This work explains the current state of research on parallel arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic on GPUs and CPUs, and proposes a number of solutions for some of the challenging problems related to this subject