Newbie question about SHA1 & GPU acceleration

[Simon]

Hi, I'm a fairly experienced developer but know very little about GPU acceleration or things like CUDA. I've read lots about SHA1 password crackers which go through millions of calculations per second. My question comes from the opposite direction. I have been trying out some SHA1 algorithms -- calculate SHA1s -- on my home computer and on smallish strings a single CPU core can handle calculating about 500k SHA1s per second. My question is: Would GPU acceleration help me calculate more SHA1s per second? If so please offer tips to go forward. Thanks, Simon

[Bitweasil]

Yes.

What are you trying to do? Password cracking, or just "hash a ton of small strings"?

Either way, a GPU will be a lot faster than a CPU for that type of heavy parallel work.

My multiforcers have SHA1 code, you could start there.