64 bits ought to be enough for anybody!

How quickly can we use brute force to guess a 64-bit number? The short answer is, it all depends on what resources are available. So we're going to examine this problem starting with the most naive approach and then expand to other techniques involving parallelization. We'll discuss parallelization at the CPU level with SIMD instructions, then via multiple cores, GPUs, and cloud computing. Along the way we'll touch on a variety of topics about microprocessors and some interesting discoveries, e.g., adding more cores isn't always an improvement, and not all cloud vCPUs are equivalent.