i read this just a few seconds ago on heise, thats a german news site
about information technology. they wrote an article about this wonderful
machine assembled in the ruhr-university in bochum. its main purpose is
to break ciphers such as DES, read more on their website :
COPACOBANA, the Cost-Optimized Parallel COde Breaker, is an FPGA-based machine which is optimized for running cryptanalytical algorithms. COPACOBANA is suitable for parallel computation problems which have low communication requirements. DES cracking is such a parallelizable problem: an exhaustive key search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) takes no longer than a week on average with COPACOBANA. Other ciphers can be attacked too, and COPACOBANA can also be used for parallel computing problem outside cryptography.
You'll find much more information about COPACOBANA on the faq page of this site.
(And yes, we know, Rio de Janeiro's famous beach is spelled slightly differently, Copacabana
