peter honeyman says:
why doesn't this impress me? i'll tell you why. with
o a stock version of des (dennis ferguson's), which is written in c, and not optimized for any particular chip or vector hardware
o a no-name 50 Mhz 486, which you can buy for under $1,000 at fry's
o netbsd, a freely available general purpose operating system
i have measured 29,000 des crypts per second.
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.
You can do even better if you happen to have 2000 sparcstations which are idle for 16 hours a day. Myself, I wonder how many machines we would need for a net parallel DES crack. Perry