

Winning team's approach to EY's SHA-1 contest (Fast GPU cluster, not the cloud) - olivers
http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/sha-1-challenge.html

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jrockway
So what exactly did engine yard get out of this? The contest showed that
neither Ruby nor "The Cloud" were useful in solving this (useless, admittedly)
problem. As a company that sells Ruby cloud services and consulting, that
doesn't exactly sound like great marketing.

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olivers
Of note: DJB personally helped this team by writing key pieces of the cluster
software.

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tsally
...who has a grant from the NSF in high speed crypto.

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jcl
I called it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=704458> :)

(And I was amused to see the winning solution is also hosted on win.tue.nl,
although it doesn't seem to be the same people.)

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profquail
Their page says that Bernstein is currently visiting TU/e. It looks like some
people from other universities committed their computing resources for the
contest though.

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mrduncan
What I find pretty fascinating is that according to their numbers the 14 GPU
cores were performing about 1.5 times as many hashes per second as the 115 CPU
cores were.

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pmorici
Those 14 GPUs have a lot more than 14 cores though. A GTX 295 graphics card
for example has 240 cores per chip x 2 chips.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_300_Series#Technical_su...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_300_Series#Technical_summary)

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basugasubaku
Interesting that CodingCrypto and hashbreaker (who tied for 2nd place but lost
the coin flip) were the same team. This wasn't mentioned on the Engine Yard
blog.

Also, this story is cute:

Paul noticed the contest and brought Dan and Tanja in - just one condition: he
would get the iPhone. Sure - sufficiently unlikely to work anyway. To make it
more likely and to have more fun with GPUs, Dan and Tanja brought in Bo-Yin
and Doug - who might now figure out how to program in Ruby and were very busy
getting all machines to work and running the code which included reconfiguring
the machines

Not sure why they mention Ruby because it doesn't seem to be actually used.

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nkurz
Ruby was mentioned because once one strips the iPhone from the prize, the part
remaining is $2000 worth of time on a cluster of machines that specializes in
supporting Ruby.

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Oompa
I'm not really surprised. This is exactly why I thought the contest was kinda
lame.

~~~
profquail
What weren't you really surprised about? That the team who won had an expert
in cryptography on their team?

The guys from the CUDA forum (one of whom got TWO scores of 31, vs. this
team's 30) wrote their software in a couple of days, and are not experts in
cryptography.

If anything, I was happy to see that CUDA (and a few ATI Stream entries) made
such a big impact in this contest. Short of using a massive CPU cluster, no
one really had much of a chance without it (expert or not).

~~~
eugenejen
Not only expert in Cryptography but also math progidy, Bo-Yin Yang was a
mathematics prodigy in Taiwan. The competition is just best for people who
already good at problem solving in the domain.

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Periodic
I'm not really sure what you mean about best at solving problems in this
domain. This was a brute force problem, so the only real skill was in making
it as fast as possible. I don't think it was any secret techniques, but rather
that they happened to be a group sitting on the right tools at the right time
and with a little bit of luck.

You can't infer after the fact that it was their genius and domain knowledge
that gave them the win, for I'm sure there were many other groups with
geniuses and domain knowledge that didn't win, as well as some without the
domain knowledge that just didn't get as lucky.

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kingkongrevenge
What are the "cloud" options for cpu intensive tasks? What is the billing? I
actually have a couple simulation problems.

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markbao
Notable that the GPU seemed to run far faster than the CPU for these
calculation instances. I think many of the low Hamming achievers used Nvidia
GPUs using CUDA which ran up to 700 million hashes per second (seeing the
_tesla_ machine in the article).

So you probably want to go for GPU than CPU. There's a service called Hoopoe
that does GPU cloud computing that uses CUDA: <http://www.gass-
ltd.co.il/hoopoe/>

