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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

This was one of my first ideas when I saw the contest, but I think it will not work unless you have a very large site you can open a more or less background popup, a lot of javascripts engines running at the same time are needed in order to compete even with just a single GPU of a good nvidia card...

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Imagine the compute power a large site like Google or Yahoo could harness just by including some JavaScript that performs some computation in the background.

Might be interesting to port something like Folding@home to JavaScript and offer a simple <script> tag sites can include, a la Google Analytics or Disqus. The first time the visitor encounters a site with this script it would prompt them with a brief explanation and options to opt in or out of the program on this site or all sites.

Indeed, I'm using CUDA (PyCUDA) and getting about 200,000 iterations per second.

what's your best one so far?

Hamming distance? Lowest looks like 31, and I've seen a bunch around there, but to save on iterations it's only dumping out every 1 million comparison, or ones less than 20.

What's notable is that my average is in the mid 30s. Seems like these JS based computers higher. Not sure why this is.

Either my hamming distance algo sucks, or my entropy pool rules. Lowest has been 28

that's not bad... i did a very quick attempt in ruby and it's been chugging away for a few hours and the best is 46 :)

rfc1036 tHreaded File poStgres donGarra MckusicK send blocks Postgres wozniak utc kahan

What does an iteration mean? I can do about 2million shas/process with just the cpu. I think CUDA is much faster.

I'm not really what he means either. If he was talking about kernel launches, there'd be no way he was getting 200k/sec since there's a bit of a launch latency (tens of milliseconds); the EngineYard program that one of the members posted on the CUDA forum can do over 200 million SHA hashes on a good card. One member said that he was getting over a billion hashes/sec on his multi-GPU setup.

By iteration, I mean one loop of my algorithm. I'm not brute forcing. There are a few other calculations I'm doing in addition to the hamming distance and the hash. I'm relying heavily on the random characters you get to append.

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