How Team Insidepro 2011 cracked 88,546 hashes in 48 hours at DEFCON2011

I am extremely surprised that cloud servers did not play a bigger part here. This Is What They're Perfect For: renting the equivalent of enormous datacenters for a brief period without much notice or prior/post capital investment. Password/hash cracking has always struck me as the archetypal use of Amazon/Rackspace/Linode/etc.

FWIW, you don't "crack" cryptographic hashes, you just find a valid preimage, of which there are infinitely many.