Parallel Computing with Low-Cost FPGAs A Framework for COPACOBANA

In many disciplines such as applied sciences or computer science, computationally challenging problems demand for extraordinary computing power, mostly provided by super computers or clusters of conventional desktop CPUs. During the last decades, several flavors of super computers have evolved, most of which are suitable for a specific type of problem. In general, dedicated clusters and super computers suffer from their extremely high cost per computation and are, due to the lack of cheap alternatives, currently the only possible solution to computational hard problems. More recently, emerging low-cost FPGAs tend to be a very cost-effective alternative to conventional CPUs for solving at least some of the computational hard problems such as those appearing in cryptanalysis and bio-informatics. In cryptanalysis, breaking symmetric or asymmetric ciphers is computationally extremely demanding. Since the security parameters (in particular the key length) of almost all practical crypto algorithms are chosen such that attacks with conventional computers are computationally infeasible, the only promising way to tackle existing ciphers (assuming no mathematical breakthrough) is to build special-purpose hardware. Dedicating those machines to the task of cryptanalysis holds the promise of a dramatically improved cost-performance ratio so tha