[Beowulf] NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, MD5, and "hobbyists"

[Prentice Bisbal]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> 
> Running 128 parallel sessions of md5sum is not so interesting at all, we
> all believe this can be done fast.
> 

Vincent,

That is the whole point of my original posting. The point was NEVER to
demonstrate the use of GPUs for streaming MD5-encrypted data. This was
the point of my posting:

1. To prove that CUDA programming is NOT as difficult as you made it out
to be.

2. To demonstrate the performance improvement you can get by
parallelizing an operation using CUDA. The MD5 algorithm was perfect for
this. No claims were ever made as to the need for parallelizing MD5.
There is value, however, if your goal is to recover (discover?) an
MD5-hashed password through a brute-force attack. Last time I checked,
MD5 password s are the default for most Linux distros.

3. To show that more than just "hobbyists" are investigating GPUs.

--
Prentice Bisbal
Linux Software Support Specialist/System Administrator
School of Natural Sciences
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ