tiCrypt Is Hardware Agnostic: What Actually Matters
tiCrypt has no hardware vendor lock-in. It runs on commodity x86_64 servers, standard networking, and whatever storage you already have. But "hardware agnostic" does not mean "no requirements."
What "Hardware Agnostic" Means
tiCrypt's backend is a set of Linux services. VM hosting uses standard KVM/libvirt. If a machine runs RHEL or Rocky Linux and has CPU virtualization extensions, it can host tiCrypt.
Storage works the same way. tiCrypt supports any libvirt pool type (directory, filesystem, netfs, LVM, RBD, ZFS) because it encrypts inside the VM with LUKS or BitLocker, not at the storage layer. Storage is a performance choice, not a compatibility one.
On-premises, colocation, cloud bare-metal -- they all work. The Infrastructure Overview covers the modular architecture.
Hard Requirements
Without these, tiCrypt will not run.
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| x86_64 CPU | KVM/QEMU and tiCrypt binaries are x86_64 only |
| VT-x or AMD-V enabled | KVM needs hardware virtualization support |
| RHEL or Rocky Linux 8/9 | The only supported host OS |
| VLAN-capable switches | OpenVSwitch bridges isolate VM traffic across VLANs |
| Shared filesystem | VM images, drives, and project data must be accessible from all hosts (any implementation: NFS, Ceph, GlusterFS, etc.) |
Any modern rack server or cloud bare-metal instance meets these. See the Infrastructure Overview for sizing and the Backend Installation Guide for the pre-installation checklist.
Hardware Depends on the Research Workflow
Meeting the hard requirements gets a deployment running. Running it well depends on the workload.
A social science team reviewing survey data in a Windows desktop needs responsive storage and a smooth display. A bioinformatics group running alignment jobs across Slurm nodes needs raw compute, memory, and filesystem throughput. No single spec fits both.
Denser nodes help in both cases: more cores, more memory, local NVMe storage. Multi-GPU nodes handle accelerated workloads through PCI passthrough.
Our deployments range from NVIDIA DGX SuperPODs with InfiniBand and parallel storage to a single server with a few dozen cores and a terabyte of local disk.
What Shapes Performance
None of these block an install, but they shape what researchers experience.
Distributed Filesystem
Every VM reads and writes through the shared filesystem. In multi-host deployments, this is the most common bottleneck. Performance comes down to storage IOPS and the network speed between VM hosts and the filesystem. NVMe is far faster than spinning disk, but even fast storage can be choked by a slow network path. See Libvirt Storage Pools and Filesystem Interplay.
Network Speed
The network carries filesystem traffic, VM-to-backend communication, connection tunnels, and inter-node MPI traffic for Slurm workloads. Plan for 10 GbE or faster in production.
GPU Passthrough
Only relevant for GPU workloads (ML, visualization). Requires IOMMU (Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi) enabled in BIOS. Most modern servers have this already.
Memory Sizing
KVM can overcommit RAM, trading density for contention risk. Physical memory needs depend on VM count and concurrency. See the Infrastructure Overview.
Encryption and Virtualization Overhead
Both are negligible on modern hardware.
Encryption. tiCrypt encrypts VM drives (LUKS/BitLocker), network tunnels, and all data at rest. Every modern x86_64 CPU includes AES-NI, which handles encryption in hardware. LUKS-encrypted drives add no measurable latency over unencrypted drives, even at the 99th percentile. This holds in FIPS mode too.
Virtualization. KVM is a Type-1 hypervisor in the Linux kernel with hardware-assisted VM entry/exit. Overhead is typically 5-10%. For tightly coupled MPI jobs, tiCrypt also supports bare-metal container execution.
What Doesn't Matter
- Server brand or OEM
- CPU generation (anything with VT-x/AMD-V from the last decade)
- On-premises, colo, or cloud
- NIC vendor or chipset
- Storage vendor or RAID controller
- Distributed filesystem implementation (NFS, Ceph, GlusterFS all work)
tiCrypt depends on standard Linux and KVM primitives, not vendor-specific integrations.
Start with the Backend Installation Guide for the pre-flight checklist, and the Infrastructure Overview for sizing.
Related: Backend Installation Guide | Infrastructure Overview | OpenVSwitch Networking | Libvirt Storage Pools | Bare-Metal Slurm