Crays and password cracking

[David Sielaff]

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" ;-)

I am probably somewhat biased as far as supercomputers go, but I in no
way speak for Cray Research, or anyone else for that matter.  My neighbor's
dog tells me what to do.

Dave Sielaff

P.S. I am a college student, and I am employed by Cray Research in the 
C Compiler Development group.  I guess that means you shouldn't trust
the Cray C Compiler, right ;->