AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility

Re:AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility by ChuckMcM on Monday November 25, 2013 @03:16PM (#6796641)

While the bitcoin craze is on-going I've heard anecdotally of one retired GPU system being used to do CFD work, the reasoning was that people would pay $50 - $150 per hour for CFD analysis run time and that was more than the machine had been "earning" when it had been build for Bitcoin mining. That said, with an ASIC you're rather constrained in your choices.

But something in the same form factor as the mining ASIC might make this a pretty powerful engine for computing 'X' for some useful definition of X, post BitCoin exhaustion.

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Re:AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility by dmix on Monday November 25, 2013 @03:27PM (#6796720)

> a pretty powerful engine for computing 'X' for some useful definition of X

Password cracking-as-a-service for China's government/companies?

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Re:AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility by wlian on Monday November 25, 2013 @05:20PM (#6797494)

Unfortunately Bitcoin ASICs are only good at double SHA-256 hashing; meaning it only does sha256(sha256(INPUT)). Probably not remotely useful of any modern password systems.

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Re:AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility by ChuckMcM on Monday November 25, 2013 @07:35PM (#6798212)

Correct, the boards are not useful for anything other than bitcoin mining. However, you give an engineer that form factor and have them design a password cracking board, now you pull out and scrap all the Miner boards, replace them with Password cracking boards, and all of the investment in the infrastructure around the boards is preserved.

My reasoning is that replacing just the boards should be less expensive than creating the entire system from scratch. It may not be much less if the infrastructure is cheap compared to the boards but less.

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Re:AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility by Everlag on Monday November 25, 2013 @07:30PM (#6798185)

So... any major government site is a target? People use sha256 because it's easy and simple.

Bcrypt? There be dragons!

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