[Lain]

This is epic Lain!
hey question, can you cluster arduino's together to distribute the workload and crack things faster?

I know people have clustered pi's so I'm kinda curious as to what would be faster, a pi cluster or an arduino cluster at cracking hashes.

mostly I'm thinking that arduino may be the better route for modules to hook up to my tablet instead of rigging a pi-top, and having some sort of cluster box I could plug in and run a decoding algorithm too would be way more useful if the overhead of the OS on the pi is taken out of the equation.

Yes and no. Observe the fritzing schematic I threw together:


Essentially what I do here is just wire up a couple of Arduino Nano's (AtMEGA328p, like the UNO) to an Arduino MEGA2560. In particular, each nano is inversely connected by the RX/TX pins (ie. MEGA2560 RX is connected to Nano TX and vice versa.)

RX and TX pins are basically just for the sake of emulating Serial communications on a single pin. Data is transferred the same way and at the same speed as defined by the baud rate. If you uploaded each of the above sketch to the Nano's then you now have the program set for distributed cracking, and you can write yourself a program for the MEGA2560 that will read from Serial inputs (MEGA2560 has up to three) and will send data over the RX/TX pins respectively to the Nano, receive the data, and send the hash back over Serial to the host computer. Since the MEGA2560 supports pseudomultithreading (ie. multiple loop() functions) then you can actually make the MEGA part run in parallel pretty well and reduce bottlenecking.

But the problem also lies in that explanation above: since you're still transferring data over a Serial-based solution, the transfer speeds are still going to impact the total hash rate, especially when you're essentially doubling it by forwarding the data through a middleman of a device. Ideally, reducing these will be key for getting better performance.