designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible.
That's a weakness, not a strength. If you can only calculate 100 hashes per second, it will take a lot longer to crack a password than if you can calculate 100 000 hashes per second.
These are all general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible."
See the rest here: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/