The board you mention looks very sweet. The name of the game here is cheap and abundant. Lots of super nodes at a low cost.

I was thinking of these boards actually:

http://www.soekris.com/vpn1401.htm

You can stuff 4-6 of them in each machine (depends on the motherboard you are using) and round-robin the crypto operations. (Open/FreeBSD can do this already for the HiFn chip.)

4 would be $288/server (1000Mbps of operations)
6 would be $426/server (1500Mbps of operations)

the new core i7 have RSA-acceleration, not sure whether SHA takes advantages of this.

Note: we also need to keep in mind the energy usage of each part, just sayin'.

I'm based in the UK. Here are a few innovative companies that I'm considering using when I implement and migrate some of my services.

Green Tech. ( Energy Saving Custom Builds etc. )

Very PC - http://www.very-pc.co.uk/

Green ISP - http://www.greenisp.net/

Please post similar links for your countries region


P.S. What Linux OS do you side towards ? Ubuntu, Open SUSE, BSD, Other ? http://distrowatch.com/

That's awesome Xunie. It will happen. Also, I bet you this wont be far to follow: Bot nets of compromised machines generating and sending bitcoins anonymously to their master.

The problem is that much of the VPN/Crypto hardware is aimed at high bandwidth crypto, or high speed RSA calculations and the like.  "Heavy Lifting"

Our needs are much simpler.. we just want to run a lot of hashes.  Even IO bandwidth isn't all that important, since we know the entire set of input data to hash, and we're only interested in characteristics of the output, and not even the hash values need to be output at all.

You can run SHA-256 on a Xilinx Spartan 3A at about 7 Mbps per MHz, so 280MHz should crunch 2170 Gbps, and you should be able to run quite a few cores given our meager I/O requirements.