

CUDA-based hash crackers for the EngineYard contest - profquail
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=102349

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angusgr
Impressive. Certainly puts CPU-based solutions using "off-the-shelf" crypto
libraries into their place.

I hope whoever ends up winning (and/or doing well) posts details and code of
their solution, this has been an interesting contest to follow and learn from.

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profquail
I've been working with CUDA now for about a year now. Last summer I went out
and bought a relatively cheap 8800 GT card, which even as an older card is
capable of something like 500 GFlops if fully utilized. My Core 2 Duo can do
about 20, and that's assuming you can code your programs with SIMD
instructions.

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light3
Its not easy to utilise the full 500 GFlops, and this is for single FP
precision, double FP precision only exists on the newer 200 series and
throughput is much lower.

But certainly CUDA is very exciting :)

~~~
profquail
Actually, I think that number may be for integer instructions, which are the
fastest (then single-precision, then double-precision). Which makes it even
better for this scenario, since the hashing algorithm only uses integer ops.

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kailoa
The EngineYard Contest is becoming a lottery of smarts. The ability to build
or find the best solution increases your odds.

~~~
gojomo
And yet: the human and CPU effort expended will exceed the prize value by many
multiples, which is why I consider this the Swoopo of computing contests.

And for those concerned with such things: think of the carbon footprint!
<:gazes down at the co2stats insert at the bottom of every HN page>

~~~
robryan
I doubt a contest like this is really about the prize for many people. It's an
opportunity for people to play around with code and learn.

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burke
Despite it being far slower than GPU-magic, this contest was a great
opportunity for me to brush up on my C and finally learn MPI. Thanks,
Engineyard :)

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hypermatt
Damn pretty exciting stuff, I've wanted to do some CUDA but I've never seen
some good starting code.

~~~
profquail
A good way to learn CUDA is to stop by the forums every once in a while and
see what other people are doing with it. Lots of people post their code for
little projects like this, which can be quite helpful for beginners.

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JeremyChase
That is pretty fast.. My C implementation for the contest will run through
just about 1 million hashes per second on a Pentium M 2.0 ghz laptop.

