Kirk, you don't need to program the SHA-256 algorithm in software - it's available as a hardware instruction using CPACF. I don't have performance numbers handy for SHA-256, but you can see SHA-512 performance in this paper: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=WH&infotype=SA&htmlfid=ZSW03283USEN&attachment=ZSW03283USEN.PDF It does over 7 million SHA-512 operations per second (per CPU) on 64-byte input data. (That's a rate of 481 MB/sec of hashing. With larger input blocks, the rate gets up to about 3.5 GB/sec.)
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