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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 14:12:43 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re:  Re: GPU acceleration?

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 06:35:52AM +0000, Phantom wrote:
> Cool idea to put forward :)
> Have been discussion this with a friend for some time (when the ideas of using
> GPUs for other tasks than generating graphics first started to appear),

Actually, I first participated in a (very brief) discussion of possible
abuse of graphics cards for password cracking in 1995 or 1996, before
there was John 1.0.  GPUs as we know them today were not around at the
time, but 2D graphics cards could do bitwise operations on pixel values
in EGA-like video modes at a rate 4 times higher than that of the data
being "written" by the CPU to video memory addresses.  This idea was
quickly dismissed as infeasible for some fairly obvious reasons.

> but did not find it likely that Solar would/could implement such a
> thing anytime soon ;)

Yes, this is not planned.

> But slightly on topic, how about support for the soon upcoming Cell processor?

This is indeed a reasonable thing to do, but it is too early to scope
the work.  It will depend on what OS drivers and development tools will
be available, etc.

-- 
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: B35D3598  fp: 6429 0D7E F130 C13E C929  6447 73C3 A290 B35D 3598
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments

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