Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gh2k 3670 days ago
I'm surprised that the primary use case for a machine with 8 of these things in would be password cracking. (https://sagitta.pw/hardware/gpu-compute-nodes/brutalis/)

There's not even any mention of training neuralnets, rendering things or doing science. Are there many non-shady reasons for purchasing the above device based on the purpose described?

2 comments

FWIW password cracking is not necessarily a shady use-case. At my old job the infosec team had a GPU cluster continuously trying to crack employees' passwords and would force users to change passwords if they succeeded.
A number of molecular dynamics, astrophysics, and similar simulation applications are scalable enough to use 8 GPUs per node. Especially when multiple nodes are involved, these scientific applications are in general more mature compared to deep-learning frameworks, which have just started supporting multiple nodes.