[redmage]

I think their point was this:

  When using a Pico FPGA cluster, however, each FPGA is able
  to perform 1.6 billion DES operations per second. A cluster
  of 176 FPGAs, installed into a single server using standard
  PCI Express slots, is capable of processing more than 280
  billion DES operations per second. This means that a key
  recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even
  with GPU acceleration, could be accomplished in less than 
  three days on the FPGA cluster.

So, they managed to brute-force DES a lot faster. No crypto breakthrough, please move along. :)

This should have been titled "FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time" or something like that.

[cperciva]

FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time

Even that isn't true. Deep Crack took 56 hours (matching the "less than three days" claimed in the article), while the combined Deep Crack + Distributed.Net effort took less than 24 hours.

[redmage]

Sorry, my bad. I didn't bother to research, just pulled that from the article.

  Pico Computing has announced that it has achieved the
  highest-known benchmark speeds for 56-bit DES decryption, 
  with reported throughput of over 280 billion keys per
  second achieved using a single, hardware-accelerated server.

[cperciva]

Ok, so 12 years after Deep Crack they've managed to get triple its performance. I can't say that I'm very impressed.

[sp332]

Deep Crack used specialized ASICs. The breakthrough is that these general-purpose (reprogrammable) FPGAs are actually faster.

[redmage]

What can I say? Pico Computing likes to brag and Dr. Dobb's published an article about it. As you said in your first comment, there's nothing new about this.

[patrickgzill]

Clearly the NSA has had such capabilities for a long, long time now.

[redmage]

Sure, but I suppose their means didn't consist in a PCI Express card filled with FPGAs, like described in the article.