What was the objective when building COPACOBANA?
COPACOBANA was built with the two main objectives (1) optimum cost-performace ratio and (2) flexibility due to reprogrammability, By using off-the-shelf componentes such as FPGAs, costs were drastically reduced compared to high-performance computers and compared to EFF’s DeepCrack. Despite the high computational performance of a single COPACOBANA machine — e.g., 48 billion DES decryptions per second — the power supply only requires approx. 600 Watts. The physical dimension of COPACOBANA are pretty small (see gallery page). The beta-version fits into a standard 19″ Rack (3 height units).
