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."

Comments

Don't worry

[FiReaNGeL]

"IBM and its partners are currently exploring a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling."

So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.

I wonder how the Fold@Home total CPU power compare to this in terms of percentage?

Re:Don't worry

[metlin]

Financial Modelling _is_ a big thing. I've worked on modelling stock and economic data using game theory and various analytic methods -- it's not as simple as that.

There's a lot of patterns, and a hell lot of data processing to be do.

However, that said, financial data modelling is not something which I think can be cracked using brute-force power. Although there has been a lot of fundamental progress in terms of using OR and GT algorithms and the like, it hasn't really had that "big breakthrough" to fundamentally determine the basis of financial data and market behaviour, and perhaps we never will.

Ofcourse, as always hope springs eternal - but that would also make markets a whole lot deterministic and bring about some serious differences in the way business is done.

Re:Don't worry

[Tim C]

Good point.

What would you do - sink a few hundred million in building a supercomputer to crack some guy's PGP key, or kidnap him, hold a gun to his head and ask for the passphrase?

You'd build the computer if it was imperative that the guy not know you'd cracked his encryption, or if you wanted to do it on a large scale. If it's just one or two guys, and secrecy isn't necessarily an issue, there are other ways...

What about SGI?

[enigma32]

I recently read that SGI was to be claiming the world's most powerful supercomputer record from the Earth Simluator...

Does this mean that IBM leapfrogged SGI or does this mean that the SGI machine (to be built for NASA) wasn't all that exciting?

http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/oct/columbia/

Chaos Theory...

[oneiron]

They really need to get these things crackin on chaos theory... How many inhabited planets equals one amino acid chain? What are our odds of hitting the protein jackpot? You know?

No key cracking

[acidblood]

I recall reading on the RealWorldTech forums that these are highly specialized machines and particularly geared to floating point computation. As integer factorization, index calculus computation for discrete logarithm cracking, Pollard rho attacks for computing elliptic curve discrete logarithms, etc. are integer algorithms, crypto should be safe from this particular beast.

And before anyone asks about symmetric/secret-key cryptosystems and hash functions, recall that these are also based on integer operations, so they're safe from the BlueGene as well.