Researcher uses PS3 to speed up password cracking.

Another example of how powerful ps3 is.

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/14992/ps3_is_a_password_cracker

You'd think of Sony's PS3 as being good for gaming. But not many would associate it with cracking passwords.

Yet that's what security researcher Nick Breese. He's used a PS3 to radically speed up password cracking, using the game console to crack eight-character passwords believed to be "strong" in just hours, rather than the days it would have taken on a computer, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The secret is in the Cell processor that runs the PS3, which goes through 1.4 billion cycles per second, as opposed to an Intel chip which runs at 10-15 million cycles per second, Breese explained at the Kiwicon Security Conference last month. The Cell chip contains several processing cores, each one of which can be carrying out actions.

Another example of how powerful ps3 is.

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/14992/ps3_is_a_password_cracker

You'd think of Sony's PS3 as being good for gaming. But not many would associate it with cracking passwords.

Yet that's what security researcher Nick Breese. He's used a PS3 to radically speed up password cracking, using the game console to crack eight-character passwords believed to be "strong" in just hours, rather than the days it would have taken on a computer, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The secret is in the Cell processor that runs the PS3, which goes through 1.4 billion cycles per second, as opposed to an Intel chip which runs at 10-15 million cycles per second, Breese explained at the Kiwicon Security Conference last month. The Cell chip contains several processing cores, each one of which can be carrying out actions.

wojtek86

what cant it do?

Pleasure you sexually. Otherwise I wouldn't still need my girlfriend lmao

Another example of how powerful ps3 is.

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/14992/ps3_is_a_password_cracker

You'd think of Sony's PS3 as being good for gaming. But not many would associate it with cracking passwords.

Yet that's what security researcher Nick Breese. He's used a PS3 to radically speed up password cracking, using the game console to crack eight-character passwords believed to be "strong" in just hours, rather than the days it would have taken on a computer, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The secret is in the Cell processor that runs the PS3, which goes through 1.4 billion cycles per second, as opposed to an Intel chip which runs at 10-15 million cycles per second, Breese explained at the Kiwicon Security Conference last month. The Cell chip contains several processing cores, each one of which can be carrying out actions.

wojtek86

Most people should associate it with being able to do something computationally intensive like that since it is basically a supercomputer. Just my two cents.The_Rick_14

Agreed. we all know it. but we didn't think about it because we (well, most of us) don't really care.

Pleasure you sexually. Otherwise I wouldn't still need my girlfriend lmao

blackadderthe8t

Not true, I watch the "videos" on my ps3 all the time lol.

[QUOTE="moshakirby"]lol @ above post.

The_Rick_14

You love to laugh at my posts because you're too much of an idiot to realize I'm right.

I own a PS3, and I love it to death, but I am absolutely sick of hearing the claims that it's a supercomputer. The 500th fastest supercomputer in the world is a little more than 6,000 times more powerful than a single PS3! Even an array of dozens of PS3s wouldn't approach the sort of processing power that ought to qualify as a supercomputer. The concept is just poorly defined enough to lend it to being abused in a superlative marketing campaign.

[QUOTE="The_Rick_14"]

[QUOTE="moshakirby"]lol @ above post.

Please_ThankYou

You love to laugh at my posts because you're too much of an idiot to realize I'm right.

I own a PS3, and I love it to death, but I am absolutely sick of hearing the claims that it's a supercomputer. The 500th fastest supercomputer in the world is a little more than 6,000 times more powerful than a single PS3! Even an array of dozens of PS3s wouldn't approach the sort of processing power that ought to qualify as a supercomputer. The concept is just poorly defined enough to lend it to being abused in a superlative marketing campaign.

[QUOTE="blackadderthe8t"]

Pleasure you sexually. Otherwise I wouldn't still need my girlfriend lmao

swatpup102

Not true, I watch the "videos" on my ps3 all the time lol.

LOL. That is HORRIFIC.

If you research the architecture of most "supercomputers" they're not physically one, single computer. The processing and calculatory power the PS3 affords in a single unit is substantial. Look at the effects it had on F@H. It can be considered a commercial supercomputer component. Clustered properly they would be substantial. Several professors and multiple higher education institutes have already used multi-unit configs for their particalur departments projects (example). I've seen a site that even offers several PS3's bundled and ready to go for monster computations.emitsu97

Sure. You could also bundle a billion Game Boys and get a supercomputer. But that doesn't make a PS3 (singular) a supercomputer.

Sure. You could also bundle a billion Game Boys and get a supercomputer. But that doesn't make a PS3 (singular) a supercomputer.Please_ThankYou

"As of November 2007 the fastest machine is BlueGene/L. This machine is a cluster of 65,536 computers, each with two processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently."

Comparatively...

"...Mueller estimates that with approximately 10,000 PS3 machines anyone could create the fastest computer in the world – albeit with limited single-precision capabilities and networking constraints."

In terms of commercially available and purposed computers, CELL equipped machines are supercomputers. A single unit CELL equipped machine has greater processing and computational abilities than other similarly purposed machines.

[QUOTE="emitsu97"]If you research the architecture of most "supercomputers" they're not physically one, single computer. The processing and calculatory power the PS3 affords in a single unit is substantial. Look at the effects it had on F@H. It can be considered a commercial supercomputer component. Clustered properly they would be substantial. Several professors and multiple higher education institutes have already used multi-unit configs for their particalur departments projects (example). I've seen a site that even offers several PS3's bundled and ready to go for monster computations.Please_ThankYou

Sure. You could also bundle a billion Game Boys and get a supercomputer. But that doesn't make a PS3 (singular) a supercomputer.

Ok "basically a supercomputer" was the wrong phrase to use, and I do apologize to moshakirby, but next time offer something substantial instead of just laughing. Have you had backed up your claim with anything else (like Please_ThankYou did) then I wouldn't have said what I did.

My point was that it has more processing power than a standard computer and therefore fits well into speeding up the process of encryption decoding, but I see now that what I said was not the right way to say it. Thanks for the correction Please_ThankYou.

[QUOTE="The_Rick_14"]

[QUOTE="moshakirby"]lol @ above post.

Please_ThankYou

You love to laugh at my posts because you're too much of an idiot to realize I'm right.

I own a PS3, and I love it to death, but I am absolutely sick of hearing the claims that it's a supercomputer. The 500th fastest supercomputer in the world is a little more than 6,000 times more powerful than a single PS3! Even an array of dozens of PS3s wouldn't approach the sort of processing power that ought to qualify as a supercomputer. The concept is just poorly defined enough to lend it to being abused in a superlative marketing campaign.

I agree, Its only way more powerfull than any other home gaming system. But not a supercomputer :P Calling it a supercomputer, is almost like calling the 60 a true next gen HD machine.

[QUOTE="Please_ThankYou"]Sure. You could also bundle a billion Game Boys and get a supercomputer. But that doesn't make a PS3 (singular) a supercomputer.emitsu97

"As of November 2007 the fastest machine is BlueGene/L. This machine is a cluster of 65,536 computers, each with two processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently."

Comparatively...

"...Mueller estimates that with approximately 10,000 PS3 machines anyone could create the fastest computer in the world – albeit with limited single-precision capabilities and networking constraints."

In terms of commercially available and purposed computers, CELL equipped machines are supercomputers. A single unit CELL equipped machine has greater processing and computational abilities than other similarly purposed machines.

At this point, I feel like a jerk because we're purely arguing semantics... but calling any computer consisting of a single CELL processor a supercomputer is misleading. It's like calling one of the billion theoretical Game Boys a supercomputer. There's no such thing as a supercomputer "in terms of commercially available and purposed computers."

I also think that Mueller's estimate seems silly. The two processors mentioned in the blurb about the BlueGene/L are a CELL and a powerful new AMD processor. I don't see how 10,000 PS3s could rival the power of more than six times as many CELL processors working in tandem with an equal number of a another kind of very powerful processor.

If you research the architecture of most "supercomputers" they're not physically one, single computer. The processing and calculatory power the PS3 affords in a single unit is substantial. Look at the effects it had on F@H. It can be considered a commercial supercomputer component. Clustered properly they would be substantial. Several professors and multiple higher education institutes have already used multi-unit configs for their particalur departments projects (example). I've seen a site that even offers several PS3's bundled and ready to go for monster computations.emitsu97