Crays and password cracking

[Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering]

In article <17550 at adm.BRL.MIL> ds at arson.cray.com (David Sielaff) writes:
>In V6#016, jerry at olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>>Several people have mentioned using a Cray to crack passwords.  From
>>what I have read, and from benchmark results, the Cray is not a very
>>fast CPU for non-vector operations.  So, unless the password
>>encryption can be vectorized, the Cray is not likely to be very fast at
>>doing it.  Now maybe one of those Amdahl systems...
>
>There may well be machines faster than Crays for scalar (non-vector)
>operations, I don't know.  The benchmarks that I have seen have
>generally concentrated on vector operations.  But if a 6.4 nanosecond
>clock qualifies as "not very fast", I wonder what you need to be "fast" ;-)
>

The Cray is quite probably the fastest scalar machine made and
designed by americans. Certain Japanese machines (remarketed by
Amdahl) are faster (from my personal experience) on both vector and
scalar operations.

Aside from the fast clock, there are multiple functional units (an
idea that can be traced to the CDC 6600 and its follow ons).

btw: password cracking is vectorizable.


Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus