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IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title

Posted by michael on from the more-power dept.

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."

11 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Uh oh by paul248 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

    1. Re:Uh oh by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!"

      --
      liqbase :: faster than paper
  2. "has two of the top ten supercomputers" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ah...

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

  3. What about SGI? by enigma32 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/

  4. Chaos Theory... by oneiron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  5. Appliccations by RealProgrammer · · Score: 5, Funny
    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>
    --
    sigs, as if you care.
    1. Re:Appliccations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative


      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/)

  6. Re:Don't worry by Coryoth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  7. Just remember by Raul654 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
  8. Re:Don't worry by JPriest · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
  9. No key cracking by acidblood · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

    Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/