[A51] Question about using PS3 hardware
Hey, Apologies if this subject has already been covered, but has anyone attempted to do table generations using PS3 hardware? On a side note, have all the tables now been generated, or are there still some outstanding? Cheers Cal ___ A51 mailing list A51@lists.reflextor.com http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51
Re: [A51] Question about using PS3 hardware
On 25/04/2011 21:18, Sylvain Munaut wrote: Hi, Apologies if this subject has already been covered, but has anyone attempted to do table generations using PS3 hardware? I did a few back-of-the-enveloppe calculation and it ended up being in the same order of magnitude as the ATI GPU cards ... but less convenient (need to re-implement / re-test / re-rebug and not really faster), so I didn't pursue. Did it work out cheaper to use PS3 hardware, in terms of physical cost? On a side note, have all the tables now been generated, or are there still some outstanding? all the tables ? AFAIK It's a statistical attack, it's never complete, each new table helps converge towards 100% success without ever reaching it (and with a diminishing return for each new table). This might be a silly question but, what is the recommended minimum and maximum total tables? Or, can you give an X number of tables will give you X percentage chance of success answer? Cheers, Sylvain ___ A51 mailing list A51@lists.reflextor.com http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51
Re: [A51] Question about using PS3 hardware
On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 10:18:11PM +0200, Sylvain Munaut wrote: Hi, Apologies if this subject has already been covered, but has anyone attempted to do table generations using PS3 hardware? I did a few back-of-the-enveloppe calculation and it ended up being in the same order of magnitude as the ATI GPU cards ... but less convenient (need to re-implement / re-test / re-rebug and not really faster), so I didn't pursue. The performance on the Cell should be quite bad: 6 * 128bit ALU @ 3ghz versus 320 * 160bit ALU @ 750mhz (HD5870) together with the fact that the PS3 has way to little RAM for the index files. So you could use it for generation, but since that phase is now over, why bother. Once there was the plan to put some Cell blade clusters to work, but it was abandoned after some initial testing of an incomplete version of the generator. What we learnt was that it could be done, development on PS3+linux is quite comfortable. Last time i checked, the Cell architecture was a dead end and the current hardware is simply too old for HPC (if you do not happen to have your code running on an existing cluster, in that case the cost of migration may be uneconomical). As a sidenote the ration of SRAM to ALUs is also higher on the cell compared to GPU, be it nvidia or ati, consequently the MIPS per square millimeter is lower for problems which do not need excessive amounts of cache memory like A5/1 crypto. ___ A51 mailing list A51@lists.reflextor.com http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51