Posts in Year 2024

BUILD A MULTI-GPU CLUSTER FOR HASHCAT WITH LINUX AND NVIDIA

Building a multi-GPU Hashcat password cracking cluster can be very economical if you choose a combination of budget GPUs with a reasonable hash rate.

Nowadays, due to the AI craze and before that due to the cryptocurrency craze, there has been a serious price inflation and price gouging by GPU vendors, such as NVIDIA, for graphics cards that can perform a lot of password cracking at scale.

In this post, I show you how to build a multi-GPU cluster and achieve a better price/performance ratio with several budget GPUs as compared to buying one expensive one.

The goal for my use case is to optimize on both price and risk. There is a risk that if you run a lot of password hash cracking on a GPU, that it may wear out earlier. When you use budget GPUs, you may wear them out but they are cheaper to replace, and hence, cost effective.

Except for the GPUs, and their PCI-E risers, everything else I bought pre-owned on online marketplaces, since you don’t need some parts to be new.

I used 5 GPUs for this cluster, and a 6th one can be added to it. This is a self-contained cluster and you do not need a monitor as I use an HDMI screen as part of it.

NOTE: This cluster can be used for machine learning and other CUDA programming too!