cluster

A newly-unveiled password-cracking system can reportedly guess billions of unique passwords every second. At that rate, it's entirely practical to have the device attempt every possible eight-character Windows password. The password-cracking system ... is a Linux-based graphical processing unit (GPU) 'cluster' that uses a special type of virtualization software which allows it to use not one, not two, but 25 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Radeon graphics cards. 350 Billion Passwords Guessed Each Second That kind of GPU power enables the cluster to guess passwords at an astonishing rate: 350 billion ... (view more)

Microsoft has released a revised beta edition of Windows High Performance Computer Server (HPC Server), in its effort to crack the supercomputing market. The new edition makes several changes which improve integration with Linux machines. ... Supercomputing is all about processing speed: the idea being to produce computers capable of performing as many calculations as possible. The types of employed tasks tend not to be technically complicated, but instead involve a great deal of detail. A typical example of supercomputing would be data modeling, in which a computer simulates future events where ... (view more)

A recent question raised a red flag in my mind. I think most, if not all, of you read my 'brief' description of about what happened to the missing 32 MB on a 512 MB Thumb Drive: Available Space Misreported by USB drive? Allow me to explain in ... greater detail. On a hard drive, thumb drive, or any other storage device in common use, the capacity displayed on the carton is the maximum 'raw' or usable number of bytes the device can hold. However, a device that 'says' it can hold 512 MB of data will not display the number 512 MB after it has been formatted. As stated in the previous article , some ... (view more)