Even if there was no disabling of an account after so many unsuccessful login attempts, there's the issue of network latency. Even if this GPU monster could check billions of combinations a second, good luck with hitting that remote system at that rate. You'd probably end up with under 100 per second, maybe not even close to that.

Usually I set my servers up to hold the server response, on a false password, for about 4 seconds, so they can't use more than 15 passwords a minute or 21600 passwords a day. And with that many false login attempts i wil be alerted

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It would be ok if the login in question was on a PC or HDD that someone had it on hand and could slam at it while it was connected to the beast.

Aye on a standalone password protected document of some sort this will probably be great. For those of us with 12+ character passwords using both cases, numbers, and special characters, this isn't really a threat to security when it's remote from out machine across a normal internet connection. Especially if you have your remote access services disabled.

.. using spare cycles for bitcoins, not BOINC :(

No bit coins there.

Amongst a lot of other interesting comments following the article, the owner of the rig states they use(d) spare cycles to mine bit coins but that mining is moving away from GPUs and into ASIC devices. I've heard the cost of electricity used to mine is greater than the value of bit coins mined.

Would BOINC/SETI@Home servers benefit from using OpenVCL in the same fashion?

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