We present IPU Trusted Extensions (ITX), a set of experimental hardware extensions that enable trusted execution environments in Graphcore's AI accelerators. ITX enables the execution of AI workloads with strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees at low performance overheads. ITX isolates workloads from untrusted hosts, and ensures their data and models remain encrypted at all times except within the IPU. ITX includes a hardware root-of-trust that provides attestation capabilities and orchestrates trusted execution, and on-chip programmable cryptographic engines for authenticated encryption of code and data at PCIe bandwidth. We also present software for ITX in the form of compiler and runtime extensions that support multi-party training without requiring a CPU-based TEE. Experimental support for ITX is included in Graphcore's GC200 IPU taped out at TSMC's 7nm technology node. Its evaluation on a development board using standard DNN training workloads suggests that ITX adds less than 5% performance overhead, and delivers up to 17x better performance compared to CPU-based confidential computing systems relying on AMD SEV-SNP.

本文介绍了IPU Trusted Extensions (ITX)，这是Graphcore人工智能加速器中一组实验性的硬件扩展，使得其可以在保证低性能开销的情况下实现强大的机密性和完整性保证，并支持多方培训等功能。

在Graphcore IPUs内部进行机密的机器学习