For those of you who missed it, Engine Yard sponsored a contest that involved cracking (or attempting to find a collision match) of a SHA1 hash. For the price of an iPhone or two, and credits on their own cluster, they captured a small army of developers and an insane amount of mind share.
One of the big surprises was the emergence of the GPU as a huge factor. I've been excited about the potential of various GPU wrappers for a while now, but it was cool seeing them in action. For certain operations, the video card processors are insanely fast. Nvidia's CUDA was first to the scene, but Intel, ATI, and even Apple have their own wrappers. Write your code in C, but use the multiple pipelined, insanely fast GPUs. No specialized graphics experience needed. (Is this why current Apple laptops have two video cards in them?)
Previous Topic
