@User137
Your last link point to an article wich explains aproximate times wich would be needed for password breaking. But have you checked on what kind of a computer (P4 1.6 GHz with 512 MB of RAM). Man that's almost ten years old computer now. If you check http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php wich provide some benchmarking results you could se that Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz processor got Passmark CPU Mark score 166 , while my AMD Turion X2 Dual Core Mobile RM-70 wich I have on my laptop got Passmark CPU Mark score 1019. That means that my processor has about 6 times more computational power than Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz wich would result in using 6 times les time for data decryption. And my processor isn't near as powerful as some other processors are today. Acording to the benchmarks on pre mentioned page the processor with the most processing power is Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz wich have Passmark CPU Mark score 15153. That is prox. 91 times more than Intel Pemtiom 4 1.4GHz. This means that it would dercypt the data about 90 times faster. So don't belive the times in that old article of yours.
And until now I was only talking about decryption with the plain power of CPU while also utilizing GPU power makes decryption much fster, upto 7 times faster on recent graphics cards and that is by asumption that you use only one graphic card. But if your system has more than one graphic card the gain would be even greater.

Now imagine that you use 1000 computers equiped with Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz processor, each also utilizing the power of graphic card and do some calculation in what would be the requred time for breaking data 256- bit encyption.