Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard challenge

Re:Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard ch... by randomwalker on Monday July 20, 2009 @06:45PM (#715388)

Let's keep some perspective here folks. The idea is cool and all, but as discussed in the other thread, SHA-1 throughput on GPUs is between 200 million and 600 million per second, depending on the GPU (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=102349&#...). On the other hand, the maximum throughput that people are getting with JS is about 3000/second. Which is a hundred thousand times slower.

I think it is safe to conclude that browser-based crowdsourcing is not a compelling approach to numerical computation.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard ch... by tlrobinson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @05:03AM (#715962)

Yeah, AFAICT the leader right now is http://twitter.com/seibert with a hamming distance of 31 (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=87acc31e73d939b72dffbf7...), and he says he's pushing 800M/sec across 4 GPUs (http://twitter.com/seibert/status/2748691432).

For comparison, this guy's distributed JS implementation just reached 1B a few hours ago: http://twitter.com/wondersquirrel/status/2750527789

If Engine Yard was trying to promote their cloud services with this contest it's rather ironic it appears it will probably be won be a few desktop computers with high end GPUs, which cloud hosts usually don't even have.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard ch... by Torn on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @12:20PM (#716464)

Even on my lowly 8800GT with quad-core I'm hitting 83+ megahashes per second -- my lowest distance is currently 37.

CUDA is pretty neat :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Crowdsourcing Bruteforcing: Help me win the EngineYard ch... by jacquesm on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @02:44AM (#715837)

That's true and it was my first thought (which is why I asked about benchmarking the js code). What it did do was to get a pretty clever idea out into the world, which is to crowdsource the answer to some contest.

Contests are usually held to fire up peoples creativity and this idea to solve it via the browser as an ad-hoc cluster is really pretty creative.

Personally I think to try to solve this contest by brute forcing it is changing it in to a simple pissing contest between the various hardware / software combination, I'm sure some guy with an fpga kit will do a lot better than the CUDA competitors.

It would be nicer if someone discovered a previously undetected flaw and solved the contest through a backdoor. that would be hacker news :)

[ Parent | on HN ]