Hash Algorithms Go Multi-Core

Although Professor Ron L. Rivest's MD6 hash algorithm isn't going to make it for the next SHA-3 standard, he does pressure NIST to require SHA-3 to include a "tree-hashing" mode that can take advantage of the increasing paralallelism and memory afforded by multi-core processors.  MD6's tree-based mode of operation is recursive and highly parallelizable.  It has been benchmarked to scale linearly with the number of cores available and has achieved throughputs of up to 2GB/sec.