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

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:Don't worry

[JPriest]

If people want your key so bad they will build a supercomputer this big to crack it, you have plenty other things to worry about.

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

[Coryoth]

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.

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...

Re:Don't worry

[Gil-galad55]

As my number theory prof once famously said, "There are easier ways of finding out secrets than factoring large primes."

Well, I thought it was funny!

Bah

[zaxios]

IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title

If their supercomputers really were that fast, they would have taken the title back earlier.

Uh oh

[paul248]

So, IBM is taking the "Fastest Supercomputer" title away from NEC's Earth Simulator. How can NEC stand for this obvious theft of intellectual property? I sense a lawsuit brewing...

Re:Uh oh

[LiquidCoooled]

Yes, the RIAA are going to sue IBM for billions of dollars.

They played one illicit mp3 at 70 teraflops.

An RIAA spokesperson said "Playing a song at those astronomical speeds is highly illegal, it almost burnt our accountants fingers just counting the zeros!"

"has two of the top ten supercomputers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah...

Must be those 2 guys I always see playing Quake with 1ms pings.

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?

Re:Chaos Theory...

[nwbvt]

"I know what Chaos Theory is."

No you don't. Put down the joint before you hurt someone.

Appliccations

[RealProgrammer]

They meant hydrodynamics, financial modeling, etc. But no mention at all of how to combat spurious lawsuits.

In an apparent first for /. today, mo mention of robots, either.

This is OT, but I never noticed it before - the following HTML works here:

link to slashdot:
<a href="/.">/.</a>

Re:Appliccations

[Anonymous Coward]

That html works anywhere, its an absolute path on the current server (slashdot.org) the path is /. which expands to http://slashdot.org/. and the . is either removed by your browser or redirected by the webserver to http://slashdot.org/ or http://slashdot.org/./ (which is of course, the same as http://slashdot.org/)

Yes, again. But...

[Thu25245]

...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)

Just remember

[Raul654]

Don't mess with people who measure their server power in acres. :p

Re:Oh, this is so great

[HBI]

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.

The future of patent law has just struck me

[zaxios]

This brings up an enticing possibility. What if Microsoft just patented "being first"? Wouldn't that get rid of all the prior art rubbish they have to cope with with their other patents? I mean, if someone showed prior art for "feline flatulence" or whatever else is developing in Bill Gates' unfortunately windowless office, they would be infringing Microsoft's "being first" patent. This is it folks! The future!

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.

Re:Speed of the computer?

[vspazv]

The test is called linpack.

http://www.top500.org/lists/linpack.php