The M4 Message Breaking Project has just announced breaking a 63 year old encrypted message from German Sub U-623 sent during the height to World War II in November 1942. They accomplished this via a distributed computing project similar to the SETI@home project. Using over 5,000 desktop computers the team was able to work through all of the possible key combinations to crack the message.
It’s interesting to note the level of security the German Enginma code machine provided, given the lack of high speed computers. With the physical limitations of silicon chips on the horizon, massively distributed computing looks to be the most promising approach to solving the worlds high end computing needs.
Virtual Enigma Machine:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/decoding/virtwave.html
Tyler Whitaker's Infotech 
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