NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently, using about 240W of power. This performance is equivalent to over 1500 Athlon FX-60 CPUs, which would take about 250kW.

This is a really cool project, and this website has an excellent graphical replacement for the "hit counter." Definately check this out. I will be speaking at Phreaknic about an idea Dan Moniz had for building a distributed computer on the internet with FPGAs. I think this is a concept which has a lot of potential, and projects like this hash cracker are just the tip of the iceberg.

Junk Hacked... FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker...