Can block validation benefit from CUDA?

[real-or-random]

@ZmnSCPxj

Maybe the best bet would be to focus on the “pure math” SECP256K1 signature validations (i.e. have the SIGHASHes come from the CPU and then push them into the GPU for validation).

This may indeed work, and it has been discussed before:

Speeding up signature verification

OpenCL support

But I’m not aware that anyone is seriously looking into it, at least not currently.

@ZmnSCPxj

I believe SECP256K1 Schnorr signatures as used in Taproot can be batch validated, meaning you only do a single calculation to validate multiple transactions that use the keyspend path. Since only a single calculation is needed, there seems to be no advantage to using a GPU in that case.

Yes, but batch verification does not mean that the work of verifying n Schnorr signatures is the same (or similar) to the work of verifying a single Schnorr signature. Batch verification of n signatures will yield nice speed-ups as compared to verifying the n signatures individually, but it’s at most a factor of ~2 in practice.