Pyrit Benchmark for Raspberry Pi

I’ve been playing with my Raspberry Pi quite a bit lately, it’s a wonderful bit of kit.  If you don’t have one already go and buy one!  The cost/power balance is really amazing.  This post is in no way a criticism of a Raspberry Pi, it is a wonderful computer made with education in mind and I am certainly learning!

Anyway, I was curious to see how Pyrit would run on the Raspberry Pi.  So this post is a Raspberry Pi Pyrit benchmark.

If anyone wants specs of my Pi I’ve got the 256 MByte Model B rev 1.  I ran a fresh copy Raspbian and installed Pyrit from the given repositories (v 0.4.0).  I set the Pi not to boot into the X Windows system at startup.

I know this device isn’t the fastest machine out there and so I wasn’t expecting much.

Here are he results.

700MHz    =        19.2 PMKs/s
800MHz    =        22.0 PMKs/s
900MHz    =        24.8 PMKs/s
950MHz    =        26.1 PMKs/s
1000MHz    =        27.9 PMKs/s

I also tried have a look at the memory split, I doubted it would make a different but it was worth a shot

900MHz @ 240mb by 16mb     24.8 PMKs/s
900MHz @ 224mb by 32mb     24.8 PMKs/s
900MHz @ 192mb by 64mb     24.8 PMKs/s
900MHz @ 128mb by 128mb     24.8 PMKs/s

At these kind of figures I’m in no way surprised that the Raspberry Pi security distro PwnPi doesn’t include it by default…

But lets assume that we ran a Pyrit cluster using 255 Raspberry Pis and you set each Pi to run at 1000MHz.  Lets also imagine that the a Pi could handle the necessary networking and interfacing to do this too (so lets consider this a thought exercise).  Also lets also imagine that when you buy a Pi you get everything you need to make it work (ie SD cards, network switch, USB cables and chargers).  So again we know that the IO on a Raspberry Pi isn’t great, but lets imagine it’s fit for purpose.

255 Pis = 7114.5 PMKs/s
255 Pis = 255 Watts
255 Pis = $6375
PMKs/s per Watt = 27.9
PMKs/s per $ = 0.90

Compare that the laptop I’m writing this on.

1 Dell Laptop = 7790.4 PMKs/s
1 Dell Laptop = 180 Watts
1 Dell Laptop = $1400
PMKs/s per watt = 43.28
PMKs/s per $ = 5.56

We have a clear winner, the laptop.

A cluster of Pis has been given the name a ‘Bramble’.  Even Raspberry Pis own wiki doesn’t recommend a Bramble, other than for academic research.