why doesn't this impress me? i'll tell you why. with [use a bunch of PCs running some freenix to do it]
now give me a "1,024 node" machine made of of these -- admittedly unwieldy, but no doubt a hell of a lot cheaper than a 1,024 node CM/5 (and a hell of a lot more useful, imho) -- and i can run at three times the "world record" rate.
Perhaps because internal communication between those 1024 machines will be significantly more difficult than running on a machine that is optimized for parallel operations, RPC just doesn't cut it. You would probably lose a number of your hosts off the top just to coordinate the activity of the remaining machines. Besides, if you really want to do this spend your one or two million (approx cost of your 1000PC site) on seriously dedicated DES-cracking parallel hardware. Do the cracking in hardware, not software. Either way, I could think of more fun things to do with those 1024 PCs :) jim