"The Electronic Frontier Foundation's DES Cracker is a project to investigate the strength of the DES encryption standard which is widely used to protect unclassified computer data and communications".
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and O'Reilly have published a book, Cracking DES. The book reveals full technical details on how researchers and data-recovery engineers can build a working DES Cracker.
DES Cracker page from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.