Since a researcher reminded me of hashcat and what it's used for ... There seems to not have been any effort to port hashcat or oclhashcat to the Parallella/Epiphany platform. This could make for a very real-world use case and some sort of benchmark baseline.
Given the combination of FPGA+many-core i'm curious if any of the whizzkids on this forum would be able to port and test it. There is a version with OpenCL support so doing so may be somewhat trivial, at least i hope so.
http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat/