FPGA mining rigs are useful for tasks other than mining

[dpifke]

I recently came across the OpenCiphers project:

http://openciphers.sourceforge.net/oc/index.php

It includes code that can be adapted to FPGA mining boards to do password recovery of encrypted files, crack wifi passwords, crack Bluetooth PINs, etc.

Lest one think there isn't a market for such a thing, I point to CloudCracker, a for-pay service that does just this:

https://www.cloudcracker.com/

I think this bodes well for the resale value of the FPGA boards which allow you to load your own bitstreams (Ztex, X6500, Icarus - basically everything except BFL).  Right now to do this you'd need the Xilinx compiler (which costs $3k) and enough knowledge of FPGA development to adapt the OpenCiphers code, but as the number of FPGA mining rigs increases, the market will be there for someone to start selling plug-and-play solutions for these sorts of applications.

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[faidsaid]

I recently came across the OpenCiphers project:

http://openciphers.sourceforge.net/oc/index.php

It includes code that can be adapted to FPGA mining boards to do password recovery of encrypted files, crack wifi passwords, crack Bluetooth PINs, etc.

Lest one think there isn't a market for such a thing, I point to CloudCracker, a for-pay service that does just this:

https://www.cloudcracker.com/

I think this bodes well for the resale value of the FPGA boards which allow you to load your own bitstreams (Ztex, X6500, Icarus - basically everything except BFL).  Right now to do this you'd need the Xilinx compiler (which costs $3k) and enough knowledge of FPGA development to adapt the OpenCiphers code, but as the number of FPGA mining rigs increases, the market will be there for someone to start selling plug-and-play solutions for these sorts of applications.

Interesting yes. Of general utility, no.

[Foxpup]

This is old news. FPGAs have been pretty much the standard tool for large-scale cryptanalysis for at least the last decade or so, and in fact can be used for any kind of simple, iterated computation. Anyone who says they have no resale value because they'll be useless if Bitcoin fails or changes algorithms is an idiot who doesn't understand what "field-programmable" means.

[faidsaid]

This is old news. FPGAs have been pretty much the standard tool for large-scale cryptanalysis for at least the last decade or so, and in fact can be used for any kind of simple, iterated computation. Anyone who says they have no resale value because they'll be useless if Bitcoin fails or changes algorithms is an idiot who doesn't understand what "field-programmable" means.

So how does the marketplace for used FPGAs compare to that for used video cards? Is there some repository of working code for the various FPGAs? I ask because the codebase for GPUs is pretty small and specialized.

[Foxpup]

So how does the marketplace for used FPGAs compare to that for used video cards? Is there some repository of working code for the various FPGAs? I ask because the codebase for GPUs is pretty small and specialized.

The market is smaller, even though FPGAs are less specialised than GPUs, but only because GPUs are so widely used in gaming. It's not that hard to find used FPGAs for sale on the Internet as well as code examples, mostly for Xilinx FPGAs. I dunno about Butterfly Labs though. I can't seem to find any information about programming them, which to me suggest there's something very wrong here... Probably best to stay away from Butterfly Labs if you're worried about resale value.