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IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title
dshaw858 writes "BBC News reports that IBM has unveiled its new Blue Gene/L machine. The Blue Gene project already has two of the top ten supercomputers in the world. Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now... maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."
No, that record was set by a previous machine. This one is just a prototype for a much larger/faster version, and still managed to hit 70 teraflops...
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
...this time, it's from NASA. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/nasa_super computer_040809.html
There's been a lot of turnover recently. For those of you keeping track at home, it's now:
IBM BlueGene/L (70.7 teraflops, up from36 in your article)
(?) NEC SX-8 (Not yet installed anywhere; estimated 58.5)
NASA/SGI Columbia (42.7)
NEC Earth Simulator (35.9)
So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.
You really need something more than just a really fast/powerful computer to do PGP cracking. You're going to need something that can help you get your fingernails under the problem, because even this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys. There has been some papers written on theoretical weaknesses in RSA that, given a custom built machine, could be exploited. This is not a custom built RSA cracker. It may have enough raw power to make up for that of course, and that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined. Unfortunately any sane PGP/GPG users are using Diffie-Hellman/El-Gamal rather than RSA as their public key system, and for now there aren't any similar attacks for the discrete log problem as there are for factoring.
Your paranoia is misplaced. You should be worried that the NSA has come up with a serious break in RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes that let them be cracked by a nice ordinary supercomputer, rather than worried about computer power overtaking key size. Most key sizes are chosen to have a fairly long lifespan even with massive increases in computing power. You aren't going to brute force 128bit symmetric systems any time soon, no matter how much computing power you stack up against it. No, the fear is in breaks to the encryption scheme.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The parent poster is referring to this book, which was from about three years ago.
I have read it. It's fundamentally a hatchet job. IBM was the prime supplier of Hollerith punched card machines worldwide, whether they were sorters or keypunch machines or whatever. The fact that they supplied them to the Nazis was used to create a conspiracy whereby IBM favored the extermination of Jews.
The book appeared to be angling to tarnish Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, primarily, rather than the modern company.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
That html works anywhere, its an absolute path on the current server (slashdot.org) the path is
No, he had an i486-DX2 clocked at 66Mhz.
/ re cord/127.htm
http://www.cpu-collector.com/menu/searchresults
Anyways I posted this just in case you thought he was jokeing. I
The test is called linpack.
http://www.top500.org/lists/linpack.php
It means that the SGI announcement was of theoretical performance. In theory it is the fastest machine on earth... they are in the process of verifying that with tests right now. Once its proven you'll see the title taken by SGI again. Then the Earth Simulator will be 3rd on the list.
Regards,
steve
Aren't Diffie-Hellman and El Gamal just key exchange methods? I didn't know they had anything to do with the encryption itself...
Diffie-Hellman is just key exchange, El-Gamal is effectively using Diffie-Hellman style operations for encryption. The important thing to remember is that PGP/GPG only uses the public key aspect for key exchange. The message itself in encrypted with a symmetric cipher scheme, and the public key is simply used to exchange the one time key for the symmetric cipher for that particular message.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Machine number one will go to Livermore, probably for doing some nuclear stuf. Number two will go to the Netherlands for the Lofar project. This is a 300 kilometer diameter radio telescope that observes at low frequencies (up to 250 MHz). It constists of thousands of small antennas spread across half the country. Their signals will be interferometrically combined to form the images (compare e.g. to the VLA). Blue Gene will be used to combine all the signals in real time, I believe the total bandwidth from the antennas is some terabyte/sec.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Yes and no.
The Linux-based host nodes manage user interaction functions, while the Linux-based service nodes provide control and monitoring capabilities.
Linux is also used in I/O nodes, which provide a gigabit Ethernet connection to the outside world for each group of 64 compute nodes, or every 128 processors. Thus, the full BlueGene/L system will have 1024 I/O nodes, which essentially form a Linux cluster.
The actual compute nodes -- the 128,000 processors -- do not run Linux, but instead run a very simple operating system written from scratch by the Project's scientists.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
SGI are NUMA. This is a cluster.
SGI NUMA boxes are the fastest *single system image* machines around. No question.
Anything that does arithmetic with integer maths can be done in FP too. My PIES project, like GIMPS and all the others, does integer maths almost entirely in the FPU units.
Logical operations, yup, they're out of scope, but addition and multiplication, which are the heart of all the arithmetic algorithms you mention, can all be hived off to the FPU.
Phil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
While I'm certainly an advocate of playing it safe with the environment, I do, however, understand the point(s) of those that don't subscribe to the global warming theory.
In truth, we don't have enough data, from our past, to understand whether our climatic changes are just brief glitches or undeniable trends.
"...The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." - Erwin Rommel
They're simulating nuclear explosions. They need to solve monstrously complicated coupled nonlinear differential equations for hydrodynamics, at high mesh densities. They also need to simulate aging of stockpiled weapons, a complex three-dimensional problem in fault dynamics, diffusion, etc. These are among the most difficult numerical simulations computers have been asked to run.
Which "unknowable" factors are those? Remember, we already have the benefit of detailed studies from real tests, a solid knowledge of how the warheads were constructed, and we have all kinds of instruments that can inspect their current condition.
How are they going to solve it without either real-life tests, or computer simulations?? Pencil and paper? Pure thought??
this also applies to fiber because the rays actually travel like /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\