Really well written comment about the history of these challenges and distributed.net.
“Cracking DES”, a book published by the EFF, contains the necessary information to build your own Deep Crack DES brute force appliance. It’s available in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/crackingdes00elec
Although there are several generations of subsequent DES cracking hardware developed by other teams (albeit not with the level of open hardware detail as Deep Crack!).
(I'm a little confused at why crack.sh had to spend roughly as much money per key per second as Copacobana, when it was being built with a more advanced model of the same manufacturer's FPGAs around a decade later. I wonder if the Virtex-6 has some high-end features that crack.sh doesn't really benefit from, but still had to pay for.)
“Cracking DES”, a book published by the EFF, contains the necessary information to build your own Deep Crack DES brute force appliance. It’s available in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/crackingdes00elec