Playstation 3 as Hashfile Generator

[shimadax]

hi haklings,

i recently installed ubuntu on my ps3 because i thought i could use the 'powerful' cell processor to generate WPA hashfiles through cowpatty and genpmk.

however, i am only getting about a 70-75 passphrase/second throughput which is pretty average.

i want to know if there are ways to speed up this process with my ps3, e.g. maybe ubuntu isnt fully utiliziing all of the ps3's resources. or maybe im just stuck with a machine that doesnt live up to all its hype

all suggestions welcome

thank you :D

[digip]

Get a server with a few nvidia cuda cards, large power supply and massive cooling, and you will be good to go. PS3 alone is not going to do it unless you write something to work from its GPU, which can do many more times the computation than the cpu itself.

Read this: http://www.backtrack-linux.org/documents/B...K_CUDA_v2.0.pdf

[Sparda]

Cowpatty is single threaded (I have been lead to believe), you need to run as many instances as you have CPU cores available to fully utilise the resources available.

[mubix]

Geohot recently cracked open the PS3, so I hope a bunch more coding efforts will start to emerge, but as of right now there really isn't much in the way of truely utilizing the CELL processor. Check out some of the PS3 hack pages to try and find some coding suggestions.

[dylanwinn]

Ya, as far as I can tell, the Cell processor acts as the PS3's GPU, and you can't utilize for anything other than basic OpenGL while running Linux. If someone could either write a better driver (longshot) or figure out a way for stock OpenGL to do raw floating-point (not gonna happen), you're stuck.

I will say that I've seen videos of Sony techdemos in which native PS3 applications were used for floating-point calculations, and the results were impressive (for the price of a PS3, at least). If someone can figure out how to run homebrew on the PS3, all you need to do is hack together an app to make your hashes (which will be hard without the Sony SDK).