Had to crack some DES hashes and because GPU station was not available, decided to try them with my laptop CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U CPU, 4 cores). I was surprized by the speed of modern laptop CPU.

i7-8550U CPU, 4 core benchmark:

Benchmarking: descrypt, traditional crypt(3) [DES 256/256 AVX2]... (8xOMP) PASS DONE
Many salts: 37847K c/s real, 4790K c/s virtual
Only one salt:  25296K c/s real, 3186K c/s virtual

Benchmark of i7 cpu


Should we try AWS also ?
I choose new m5.metal and g3.16xlarge instances
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-five-new-amazon-ec2-bare-metal-instances-m5-m5d-r5-r5d-and-z1d/

Instance Name Sustained All-Core Turbo Logical Processors Memory Local Storage EBS-Optimized Bandwidth Network Bandwidth Price
m5.metal Up to 3.1 GHz 96 384 GiB – 14 Gbps 25 Gbps $4.608

AWS m5.metal 96 vcpu core benchmark:

Benchmarking: descrypt, traditional crypt(3) [DES 512/512 AVX512F]... (96xOMP) PASS DONE
Many salts: 611057K c/s real, 6383K c/s virtual
Only one salt:  50611K c/s real, 536841 c/s virtual

Benchmark of m5.metal


Htop was pleasant to look at: aws-htop-john


Model GPUs vCPU Mem (GiB) GPU Memory (GiB) Network Performance Price
g3.16xlarge 4 64 488 32 25 Gigabit $7.504

AWS g3.16xlarge 4 gpu core benchmark: 

Device 1: Tesla M60
Benchmarking: descrypt-opencl, traditional crypt(3) [DES OpenCL]... DONE
Note: This format may also be benchmarked using --mask (see doc/MASK).
Many salts:     1439K c/s real, 22562 c/s virtual
Only one salt:  1798K c/s real, 28109 c/s virtual

John refused to run test with multiple GPU’s, take result above and multiply it with 4.
Cracking with GPU also failed at the end, so use hashcat or m5.metal instance, when hashcat is not an option.