Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

GORMUR writes "IBM has launched its Watson Blue Gene system, the largest privately owned supercompuer seen by the press. The super computer is described reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops. IBM has plans on giving Academic researchers access to some computing time. Some more info can be found the IBM site. All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption."

Comments

REVENGE!

[flawedgeek]

Apple, you might wanna rethink that switch to Intel.....

Re:REVENGE!

[ottothecow]

And you know that that offer to academic institutions is just a lure...

"You see, this is the finest private super computer on IBM processors. You may have heard about the school that has a apple super computer, well, that was made when they used IBM processors. If you happen to be in the market for a supercomputer be aware that you can no longer trust Apple to make them the say way and are safer going directly with a system from IBM. Please enjoy your computing time, we sincerely hope that you did not accidentally underestimate the power of our supercomputer and lease too much time."

All inquiries can be addressed by the sales division in room 341b.

Re:REVENGE!

[Skater]

Yes, but can it run OS X?

Re:REVENGE!

[piinkfloyyd]

re: SIG.... if they were truly magic cards, wouldn't they sell themselves?

Re:REVENGE!

[dodobh]

Don't worry, Intel processors can be obtained at a mere 3 cents per CPU, with networks of upto a million CPUs available.

Re:REVENGE!

[john_uy]

i think the reason for apple switching to intel is that ibm does not want to manufacture chips for apple anymore. with the demand for the new cell in the next generation of consoles and probably their focus on embedded and power family, it's easier for them to dump apple and pay them compared to retaining them.

Re:REVENGE!

[wild_berry]

In Soviet Russia, the processors acquire you!

Mactel

[Anonymous Coward]

Mactel

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

Yes, it is time, because I am sure all of these companies are spending all of this money to read linux nerds' emails.

Re:Yes!

[MrDomino]

Well, with things like Beowulf clusters that can be built from commodity hardware, things like password-cracking are becoming easier...

On the other hand, why bother wasting computer time on passwords when companies publicly transport them, unencrypted, on plain backup tape? Really, all you can do to ensure password safety is use a variety of passwords at different places, to prevent one idiot dot-com from screwing your whole identity over. Personally, I predict that social engineering and simply taking advantage of lax business practices will continue to be much more popular than actual brute-force cracking until quantum computers become widely available.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

"companies publicly transport them, unencrypted, on plain backup tape" --- are you high? Unless you're talking about sniffer logs, but then most people don't log the payload...

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it run Linux? Oh, wait...

Largest Privately Øwned Supercomputer

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude!

NSA...

[ThomasFlip]

I think it's safe to say that the NSA, with it's largest budget out of any intelligence agency in the U.S, has probably cracked the 100 TF mark ? It's a shame we will never no what kind of muscle they can flex.

Re:NSA...

[slavemowgli]

What's really bad (or good, depending on one's point of view, I assume) about the NSA is not just the computing power they likely wield (they're the biggest consumer of electric power in the entire state of Maryland, so they probably do have some big iron there on site), but also the theoretical power in the form of mathematicians. The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned.

Remember, for example, that the NSA invented public-key cryptography before Diffie and Hellman did; or remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.

I dare say that this theoretical advantage is actually more important than the pure number crunching power they wield. There's virtually no limit on the computing power you can buy if you have enough money at your disposal (for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars), but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.

Re:NSA...

[smittyoneeach]

No Such Agency

Re:NSA...

[jmcharry]

I believe the claim that they invented it before Cocks, et al. is largely unsubstantiated. Wikipedia has a summary and some references for the disputed claims. It is quite possible they did, but it is also quite possible they found the claim that they did useful.

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA didn't invent public key cryptography, one of the UK's equivalents did.

Re:NSA...

[damiangerous]

The NSA claims to have invented public key crypto in the 60's, before it was known to have been invented in the UK in the early 70's and "reinvented" as RSA in the USA in 1976. Considering their history with DES, among other things, it's entirely feasible.

Re:NSA...

[antiphoton]

We will eventually find out about any technology under wraps by the government, as history has proven. The internet was a military system later released to the public. Colossus and other wartime computers were secret until later on as well. So I wouldn't be so quick to say we will never know*. You see, it's beneficial for the government to eventually release tech into the public; it strengthens the economy due to the exclusiveness and demand of trade.

Re:NSA...

[antrik]

> I think it's safe to say that the NSA, with it's largest budget out of any intelligence agency in the U.S, has probably cracked the 100 TF mark ? It's a shame we will never no what kind of muscle they can flex.

This kind of conspiracy theory seems very common; but it never sounded very convincing to me. This is simply a major logistic problem: While a thing like Manhattan Project was possible by being nearly self-sustaining, I seriously doubt NSA can secretly keep a state-of-the-art processor fab running. Nor can they secretly get such large supplies from any commercial company: How would IBM for example prevent all it's employees from leaking the information, if they forked a few 100000 Power processors for NSA?...

Re:NSA...

[slavemowgli]

More on this here; also see Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which, IIRC, has a section about this.

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard 2 stories about the NSA.

One was from a professor in College. He was a big person in the HPC (High Performance Computing) world. At one point he was on the board of some large public government super computers. He had talked about some 2000+ processor built buy Sun that went into the NSA facility. This was a few years ago, so who knows if it has changed or not.

Second was maybe the NSA, but I know it was some high clearance government facility. When any of these highly classified places need tech support, it really isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Any company that sells stuff to these organizations has to employee people with clearance high enough to enter the buildings. Plus, if you are going in to debug some hardware/software problem, you can't bring that many tools with you. You are not allowed to leave with any kind of electronic that you bring into their buildings. Most of these tend to be incinerated. Also, when you enter secure rooms, there are some big red lights above the doors that go off telling everyone else in the room that someone is entering the room that isn't allowed to see anything (ie: the tech support guys).

They also won't let you work on the equipment directly. They bring it to you in a small room... really interesting stuff.

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> This kind of conspiracy theory seems very common;

Hey, I just thought of a good one; what if the NSA had compromised SETI at home or folding at home? Imagine the geeks of the world functioning as a secret government supercomputer, blissfully ignorant of it the whole time.

no, I don't believe it, but if the NSA were gaming everyone I'd laugh....

Re:NSA...

[imr]

...

The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world

...

but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.

Re:NSA...

[uncqual]

If NSA needed a whole bunch of hardware (or fab equip), they might spread the requests out among a number of shell companies. Not sure this could hide something of the magnitude of a fab however.

When I was working at a fairly small company many years ago, we got an order for some of our product from some blandly named company (like "Marketing Strategies, Inc." or something) which no one had heard of which was odd since most of not all of our customers were Fortune 100 companies (the product was expensive and really not of much interest to midsize companies). The team that went to do the install in Virginia or Maryland thought it odd that it was being installed in a bland brick building with no windows and surrounded by barbed wire topped fence.

Oh yes, they were a great customer -- I never saw a core file from them - and I suspect it wasn't because they didn't have software failures!

We always assumed it was the NSA...

Re:NSA...

[ScrewMaster]

*cough* Skynet *cough cough*

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt NSA can secretly keep a state-of-the-art processor fab running.

Me too.

It doesn't seem to be secret at all.

Re:NSA...

[iggymanz]

heh, I could think of a test of their abilities that involves using less & less complex encryption until the nice g men kicks in your front door....then you'd have an estimation of their computing power.

Re:NSA...

[PingPongBoy]

No one really needs their own fab just for custom designs. Existing fabs can construct custom chips.

Very fast decryption machines indeed.

Oddly, not much in the news about decrypted information being used by the government in court or the like. A lot of evidence exists as database information, spreadsheets, e-mail, websites, source code, photos, etc. - all plaintext.

Foreign powers planning an attack may communicate in such short bursts followed so quickly by the actual attack that all the decryption in the world can't figure out what is going on. How can Bin Laden send so many people to flying school for years without any NSA red flagging? Because no one talks. Loose lips sink ships.

Now guess what?? The NSA is working on mind reading. They have to. It's technologically possible. But now that we know what the NSA is working on, they only have a couple of years lead at most, right? 2010 - mind readers are coming to Best Buy, Nintendo, etc. No more mouse and keyboard. DVORAK vs. QWERTY will be academic.

Is the NSA working on mind altering devices?? Free will must be preserved.

Re:NSA...

[ezzzD55J]

remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.

you're probably right about the nsa being years ahead of the rest of the world, however the above isn't a good example of that because that little episode (des becoming public) pretty much started public cryptographic research.

Re:NSA...

[Diag]

How would IBM for example prevent all it's employees from leaking the information...

Well, they wouldn't be able to prevent that. The answer is to only tell those who "need to know" where the chips are going.

I'm sure the folk on the chip assembly lines don't know, or even care, where the umpteen processors they QC'd on any day will end up.

IBM is probably a bad example for the parent poster to use. IBM, more-so than just about any other IT company, would have been involved in a lot of "secret" transactions with government agencies from various countries over many years. (For example, I can't imagine the Soviets knew much detail about the computers in the Apollo missions, but I may be wrong.)

Even deals with non-government companies are commonly kept confidential, at least until the deal is signed, and indefinitely if the customer requires it.

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA needs very specialized hardware for their supercomputer needs. IBM Watson is building those too, but you won't see a press release about it.

Re:NSA...

[rikkards]

Last place I was at had a yellow light but YMMV and that was more of a warning that ears who did not have need to know access were around.

Re:NSA...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

A minor correction, it was not the NSA who invented public key cryptography before Diffie and Hellman but GCHQ in the UK.

For an interesting read on this subject matter I suggest The Code Book, written by Simon Singh.

Re:NSA...

[z0idberg]

We will eventually find out about any technology under wraps by the government, as history has proven. The internet was a military system later released to the public. Colossus and other wartime computers were secret until later on as well. So I wouldn't be so quick to say we will never know*.
Maybe there have been technologies in the past that we really never will know about....(wouldnt it be impossible to prove otherwise?).
I would like to think that everything comes out into the open eventually but who is to say it doesnt/hasnt?

Re:NSA...

[Professor_UNIX]

How would IBM for example prevent all it's employees from leaking the information, if they forked a few 100000 Power processors for NSA?...

They would need to develop it in the open, perhaps as part of some major popular platform. They'd need to achieve at least 2.2 teraflops per node to make it worth their while and make it feasible.. but where on earth could they develop that kind of platform in the open and not have people question it? Perhaps some kind of gaming system!

Re:NSA...

[Horus1664]

Bearing in mind the business the NSA is in how reliable is any claim they make, about anything ? Surely the key thing here is that nobody (neither NSA, nor GCHQ, nor any other security service) can be sure that others have not either penetrated their current secure communications or are not communicating themselves in new and presently undetectable ways. No country has cornered the market in great minds and I would further venture that more brilliant mathematicians live, work and are being born outside the US than inside, and many of them would not wish to work for a clandestine US organisation, however much money (or coffee) was on offer. Paranoia must be the watchword I would imagine...

Re:NSA...

[3waygeek]

Well, the NSA is about 200 years ahead of the rest of the world in theoretical maths.

Re:NSA...

[HerbieTMac]

Sure you can learn just what kind of supercomputer NSA has operating. Just head on over to https://www.nsa.gov/applyonline/index.html and let them know you are interested.

Re:NSA...

[jacksonj04]

A gaming system... built on a revolutionarily powerful processor... with internet capabilities built in... which would be bought by millions...

Wait a second, those gameboys weren't all they seemed!

Re:NSA...

[VolciMaster]

Quoting Bruce Schneier:

"Additionally, algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: they come from a superior race with no explanations. Any successful cryptanalysis against an NSA algorithm is an interesting data point in the eternal question of how good they really are in there."

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dan Brown was on the ball in 2000...

Re:NSA...

[flaming-opus]

Maybe, but that assumes that they need a really large capability class computer for one task. I have no idea what the NSA uses their supercomputers for, nor do I have any idea how those programs behave. However, they may not need one big super, and might instead have dozens of machines in the 2-10 TF range. For a lot of complicated codes, there is a transition point around 100 processors, where adding more processors does very little to speed up the job. Certaintly not all codes, but some.

NSA did fund the development of the cray X1 and X1e. It's pretty safe to assume they have several pretty large X1s somewhere in maryland. A 512 node X1 weighs in at only 6TFlops, but has the memory bandwidth to actually sustain that, unlike some of the highly parallel machines like blue gene.

It's probably safe to say that they also have a lot of BIG IBM machines too.

Re:NSA...

[tempest69]

The computing power thing isnt too hard to figure out. You get their power usage, subtract 100 w per employee roughly. Then assume the rest is dedicated to computing power/cooling. While I'm betting that the NSA still keeps some horribly inneficient garbage around, along with new power friendly clusters around. So you could figure out their theoretical max flops by a ratio of about 50w-100w/gigaflop, it sounds high but with AC and old clusters it might be low. Then you lower it a whole bunch more, because the NSA doesnt need FLOPS, they need brutal bytes/sec and petaflops of data. Heck I figure they probably have agents interning at google just to get better ideas on how to manage their boxen.

The NSA has totally blown through the 100 Tflop spot, but I'm betting that theyre doing it in a high latency fashion that would make you go "geez, I didnt mean that way!".

While I bet the NSA does have some nice stuff, they have bounded funds, and getting a machine suitable for high end fluid dynamics is a pain in the ass to justify to a spymaster, when he can just a$k NASA to get some time on their boxes.

The NSA is cool, they just arent what hollywood shows. They're a bunch of people willing to die for the greater good, and realizing that only a handful people will ever know they're heroes.

Storm

Re:NSA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I doubt it. NSA has no need for a synchronized cluster to run their kind of algorithms. Code breaking and text analysis are easily partitionable tasks that can be done very effectively on a computer cluster that has a very low performance interconnect, like a 100 Mb LAN.

Think Google. That's the future of computing at NSA. I doubt they could muster a decent LINPACK number on any of their machines.

However, the total number of Flops available within NSA is likely to be a different story...

Randy

Re:NSA...

[unspec]

Funny, I remember that GCHQ invented public-key cryptography. In 1973!

Re:NSA...

[maverick97008]

Its called classified information, it happens all the time. All of IBM's employees would not know that the biggest consumer of their chips was the NSA, only a few key employees, and each of them may only know small parts of whole relationship. How is it that Apple (Shipping ~1m units per quarter) is only 2% of the market for the powerpc? That means IBM is shipping 200m units per year. IBM does not sell THAT many computers. Who is buying the rest?

Re:NSA...

[babble123]

for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars

For example, somebody like DARPA?

Re:NSA...

[crucini]

Generally, NSA doesn't feed info to law enforcement. Their domain is national security. However I have no idea how the war on terror has affected this boundary.

NSA is not allowed to knowingly listen to US citizens inside the US. Also, disclosing intercepts would jeopardize technical sources that are more important than a criminal conviction.

In other words, your idea is good; all signals intelligence agencies have already thought it through; therefore the idea is no longer good. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon has a fascinating subplot on this topic.

SHA Collisions

[Anonymous Coward]

People using 256-bit encryption algorithms should be safe for now, given the massive amount of computations needed for key exhaustion. However we should be working on implementing SHA-512 as soon as possible as it will soon become trivial to find collisions in SHA1

Re:SHA Collisions

[IsThisWorking]

Ask and you shall receive:

http://www.google.com/search?q=SHA512

On the first page there are SHA-512 implementations for PHP, .Net and Java.

BTW, there are 256, 384 and 512 variations.

My data isn't really all that private

[Lingur]

If you have to defend yourself against some entity that owns the world's fastest supercomputer and doesn't want you to know it, I don't know what you'r e hiding and I don't want to know.

Seriously, I'm not about to change all my passwords and strengthen my keys because whatever money I have in my bank account is just a drop in the ocean for those guys.

Re:My data isn't really all that private

[kfg]

If they don't want you to know about it, how do you know what it is that you need to hide?

KFG

Re:My data isn't really all that private

[Anonymous Coward]

> > If you have to defend yourself against some entity that owns the world's fastest supercomputer and doesn't want you to know it, I don't know what you're hiding and I don't want to know.
>
> If they don't want you to know about it, how do you know what it is that you need to hide?

If you don't know what you need to hide, you don't have a need to know what you need to hide. If you don't have a need to know what you need to hide, you know you don't have a need to know what you need to fear. :)

Re:My data isn't really all that private

[Errtu76]

But isn't it much easier than for these guys to select people like you as targets? People who think "i dont have too much money, so i'll never be a victim" won't have strong passwords/keys.

So if i was up to no good, i would rather select 50 people with little cash and weak passwords, than an individual with more money, but stronger passwords.

Re:My data isn't really all that private

[Lingur]

Yes, that thought had occured to me. But how would they know that you didn't have any money without looking into your financial records. If they've already gone that far, I'm doomed anyway since they have the worlds fastest computer :)

A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[metachor]

Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance?

Google search of 'supercomputer whopping'.

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[ZenCow]

And why is it always 'a whopping'? Is 'the whopping' too busy?

I know, I know... "don't make me whop you!"

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[Andy_R]

Well it does sound better than 'nearly as powerful as 41 playstation 3s'

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[justin_saunders]

In Soviet Russia, the supercomputer whops you!

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please translate that into library of congresses

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[SpaghettiPattern]

Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance?
No but as soon as I use any of the British sounding superlatives I get modded down.

Watch this experiment:
Staggering

You see, I just got modded down!

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[Diag]

Let me try ...

Naff?

Manky?

Spiffy!

"A spiffy 91.29 teraflops."

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pah! My Mac's faster than that. At least, it would be if anyone optimized for altivec.

Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops?

[SpaghettiPattern]

Diag, I think we are knowingly ignored by the /. mass. Lemme imagine a complot theory....

Pish posh...

[AtariAmarok]

Compared to the Milliard Gargantubrain in my garage, this thing is a mere abacus. Consider it not.

Re:Pish posh...

[sumdumass]

I was thinking sopmethign simular. My pieced together 200 processor unit should reach a couple dozen terraflops. I know it can display 9 pron dvds and 2 downloaded pron videos all at once. the only thing it lacks is a spell cheker.

Maybe i too can rent proccessor time out to universities in exchange for a faster internet conection. Just imagine, pron faster then i can watch. heaven can be real.

Re:Pish posh...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a secret Matrioshka Brain that I'm not telling anyone about...

Oh, wait.

(Sure, some astronomers were puzzled when the light of a star disappeared quite suddenly, but they'll get over it.)

I have a supercomputer

[Nicky G]

In my pants.

Re:I have a supercomputer

[viva_fourier]

yes, but I doubt if there's anyone in the queue to get on it...

Re:I have a supercomputer

[psvm]

I'm afraid you seem to have confused supercomputer with a palm-pilot.

Re:I have a supercomputer

[William Robinson]

Umm.. how many flops it has managed so far?

Re:I have a supercomputer

[Slashcrunch]

I bet you drive a red sports car as well

Re:I have a supercomputer

[Albinofrenchy]

A shame you will be the only one to ever use it.

Re:I have a supercomputer

[youlikemonkeytennis]

I think we have witnessed the largest string of funny comments ever on Slashdot - and to think it all started by somebody saying that they had a supercomputer in their pants.. I can officially say that my comment is one below the last comment in this string to be modded funny. Thank you.

Re:I have a supercomputer

[TheLinuxWarrior]

You seem to have confused a computer device with his late night hobby title. :)

Re:I have a supercomputer

[Anonymous Coward]

And you run SETI@home during the idle cycles.

Re:I have a supercomputer

[buraianto]

Great. Another slashdotter thinking with his genitals instead of his brain.

So...

[codexwriter]

I need 400 PS3's to make one of these.
Who wants to help me start a fundraiser?

Re:So...

[chadamir]

Actually you only need about 40-50!! They do about 2.7 terraflops each. Factoring in processing time lost due to node limitations that should be about right. IBM clearly overpayed. Kinda dumb when im sure they dont pay retail for cell processors.

Re:So...

[lymph]

Actually, the memory is only 256 megs per node. I don't think you could do any 'real' science research with a memory limit like that. I would say IBM knows what they are doing.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, IBM's cost in building the G5 was likely larger than the price, and the same will probably go for the Cell for a couple years.

"Seen by the Press"

[DyslexicLegume]

Notice how the article says "seen by the press"...maybe there's an even more powerful one in the hands of some evil mastermind on an island in the Pacific who is plotting world domination by having it create a super weapon to destroy everything in its path...yet the computer always keeps giving the same answer:

42

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[ExploHD]

I thought it would tell him to use a "laser" to put a hole in the "ozone"

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[brilinux]

... or the NSA...

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[0racle]

Since the NSA is a government organization, wouldn't the qualifier 'privately owned' mean that they weren't comparing Gene here to something they have?

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[kfg]

The Question:

How many sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads do I need to take over the world?

KFG

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[saleenS281]

No, Saddam has one buried in the iraqi deserts, it's guarding his WMD's.

Re:"Seen by the Press"

[minikomi]

They also let them smell, touch, and share intimate moments with several other, more powerful computers on the premise they were blindfolded throughout.

The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[kc32]

What's the largest non-privately owned supercomputer? And can I play Doom 3 on it?

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[smittyoneeach]

D00D, it's so advanced, you can go forward in time and play Duke Nukem Forever, just for a second.

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the largest non-privately owned supercomputer?

I could tell you but then I would have to deactivate you.

And can I play Doom 3 on it?

It plays Doom 3 on you.

Even that may be too much info.

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that dude, I hear IBM have got a huge computer... that PLAYS CHESS. Can you imagine that???

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[ScrewMaster]

And can I play Doom 3 on it?

Yes, at 1,573,402,201 FPS.

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[r2q2]

They dismantled deep blue. Actually they used to own a computer that plays only chess.

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

>What's the largest non-privately owned supercomputer? And can I play Doom 3 on it?

In soviet Russia supercomputers play Doom 3 on you!

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[Auraiken]

Go forward in time all you want, duke nukem forever still won't be finished.

Re:The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer?

[Man from Trantor]

One thing's for sure: No matter how powerful, it's bound to be at least 1000 miles from me and my ping's still going to be >100...

sure.

[St. Arbirix]

All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

Yes, I, private citizen of a nation with a resident population of 296,365,988, am worried that the stuff I use private key encryption on will be under attack.

Until I'm dating a girl with a billionaire ex-boyfriend/stalker I think I should be fine keeping things the way they are.

Besides, I tend to make up my own encryption scheme for truly sensitive pictu^H^H^H^H^Hdocuments and then just delete the method.

Re:sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption Schmichion

We should be more concerned about someone with a Knoppix live-cd or something along those line. That thing has thus far given me unfettered access to more than 98% of the computer system into which I have booted it. For those that had no CD-rom you can just use an USB cd-rom. The only trouble you might encounter is if the BIOS is not set to boot off the CD-rom first and it has a password

Re:sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because no one interested in cracking encryption would know how to set up a botnet.

Then again you really could be an utterly uninteresting person, which is an idea your laughable comment about "making up your own encryption" would certainly strengthen.

Re:sure.

[zerocool^]

Besides, I tend to make up my own encryption scheme for truly sensitive pictu^H^H^H^H^Hdocuments and then just delete the method.

Dude, if you encrypt your pr0n with a proprietary, undocumented encryption, you're either wearing enough tin-foil to build an aircraft, or you're into some really wierd shit I don't wanna know about.

Re:sure.

[Guppy06]

"Yes, I, private citizen of a nation with a resident population of 296,365,988, am worried that the stuff I use private key encryption on will be under attack."

The more processing power you have, the more insignifigant the effort to crack a single encrypted message. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help against brute force attacks.

Whether or not someone will actually be there to interpret the data is another matter, but why let it get to that stage?

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

I really don't see the use of a supercomputer in the establishment of botnets. Since when is the creation of a zombie node dependent on functional security? Botnets are built on security vulnerabilities. The supercomputer attack would only be useful on a legitimately high strength encryption system.

So, yes, no one interested in encryption would be involved in setting up a botnet.

And when I say I make up my own encryption I'm not saying it's all that exciting or wonderful, it's just not what anyone would expect to be dealing with and so they wouldn't know how to attack it. For example, take a binary and replace every fourth byte with a random number and then dump the pulled bytes in reverse order at the end of the file. I just made it up, but I'd bet it'd confuse people.

Re:sure.

[shemp9999]

Maybe his SO is 1337?

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

You missed the girlfriend comment in the previous paragraph.

Re:sure.

[shemp9999]

a technicality, but i thought it referred to a maniacal stalker guy with enough money for his own supercomputer who had dated/stalked some future girlfriend and held a grudge, not his possible current doesn't-want-her-to-see-his-porn-collection, hacker girlfriend.

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

Sadly, the easiest way to hide porn collections from the girls in my life is to drop them in folders called "programming" or "linux" or something else that they're in the habit of ignoring.

After a while it's like the words don't even exist to them.

Send secretive emails with topics like "fR33 \/a1ium" and when someone looks in your inbox their eyes will just glide past the words.

Re:sure.

[shemp9999]

i got a spotlight on my tiger.

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

Ew. I haven't upgraded yet.

But wait, I don't have porn anymore.

Re:sure.

[lymph]

Damn guys. Why hide your pr0n from your girl? My girl downloads pr0n that makes me blush, my pr0n is just redheads with big tits.

Share with your girl (and vice-versa). You'll either get better sex or she'll leave. Either way you won't have to put up with her tight-ass anymore.

Re:sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming that you have an NP-complete or NP-hard encryption scheme and that P!=NP, then the only practical way to break encryption is to brute force it. Basically, you have to try every possible key (or at least lots of possible keys) until you get one that works. If you try to do these one at a time, it'll take almost forever. ("Forever" literally meaning years or longer.) However, brute forcing an encryption algorithm is inherently parallel-- that's why non-deterministic Turing machines can break NP-hard encryption in polynomial time, while deterministic Turing machines can only do it in exponential time.

Basically, in order to break encryption, you need to throw lots and lots of computers at it-- which is exactly what botnets are good for. So yes, someone interested in breaking encryption would be legitimately interested in setting up a botnet.

Re:sure.

[shemp9999]

me...either.

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

I could have sworn that this article was about supercomputers and not botnets.

Re:sure.

[St. Arbirix]

Notice I said "girls in my life" which is plural. If I had porn on my computer they would not appreciate it: with all of them around, why do I have porn? Porn is for inspiration, not personal enjoyment.

Re:sure.

[hatchet]

Cracking encryption is waste of time for potential intruders. And noone cracks encryption anyway.

Security breaches are caused by bad administration and bad habits. People in offices have passwords written on monitors, mobile phones, ... and they also send passwords via unsecure communication method. (e-mail, phone, ...) - that's the major problem in security.

Re:sure.

[haakoneide]

Not a problem at all. Use http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ to boot from the CD-rom using a floppydisk

Re:sure.

[Zone-MR]

We should be more concerned about someone with a Knoppix live-cd or something along those line. That thing has thus far given me unfettered access to more than 98% of the computer system into which I have booted it.

If you have physical access to a computer, it's hardly surprising that you can gain full control over it. Similarly, if you give someone else physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.

Of course noone should be storing sensitive data in plaintext on a workstation's hard drive.

Re:sure.

[daikokatana]

This is something that has always puzzled me: you speak of brute forcing an encryption algorithm, but how do you brute force something of which you do not know a) which method was used? b) how many were used? c) what the outcome would be?

For example, if I told you that lck6jch5ziu6hf8kh5kr2hi4hfo4iv33u was the encrypted result of a word, what would be the word? How would one go about decrypting this (and thus breaking the code)?

Re:sure.

[Haydn Fenton]

Haha, my pr0n is also in a subfolder in a folder called programming, along with my real programming files. I have a feeling that if someone ever checks the size of the folder, or decides to show hidden\system files and thinks my MacroMouse "program" sounds interesting, I might be outed. I may be a geek, but almost half a gig of code for one program is a little much.

Re:sure.

[johansalk]

"Until I'm dating a girl with a billionaire ex-boyfriend/stalker I think I should be fine keeping things the way they are."

No matter how teraflop-sophisticated the tools of humanity become, it always comes down to "pussy".

Re:sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, if I told you that lck6jch5ziu6hf8kh5kr2hi4hfo4iv33u was the encrypted result of a word, what would be the word? How would one go about decrypting this (and thus breaking the code)?

For starters, you said you encrypted a word. Words have certain size limits and certain letter frequencies. The ciphertext could then be run through various known (guessed) encryption schemes to see if anything came up right away that looked like a word. Otherwise, you would need to provide another example to help establish a pattern.

And that's where one-time pads come into play. They are truly (theoretically) unbreakable ciphers. Google can pull up more information for you on the topic.

Of course, what is it worth to break the encryption? If you want to keep knowledge of interception and the breakage a secret, then you concentrate on reversing the encryption. Else you could just steal the equipment, documents, or people....

Government contractors

[Anonymous Coward]

Sit down, and let me tell you a little secret: The larger the budget a gov't agency has, the more they will have to spend. They probably paid ten times as much, only to get 91.3 TFs

Re:Government contractors

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they had those teraflops in 1985.

Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[Anonymous Coward]

It is largely unnecessary to increase the size of your keys, it stopped slowing us down quite a while ago. Don't even get us started on the usefulness of tin foil hats.

Love,

The Government

P.S: Don't you people starting clearing the porn off your hard drives, this job gets pretty boring sometimes.

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[smittyoneeach]

Now, come on, Mr. G-man: we know love is something you've never Felt...

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[glassjaw rocks]

On the contrary!

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=Sporkotica&tab =weblogs&uid=193170658

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[ScrewMaster]

Long ago and far away in a distant galaxy, when I was in high school, there was an IBM S360 mainframe that was connected to several 3270 terminals in the library. I had typed in quite a collection of obscene limericks at one point and was in the middle of adding some new ones when the multitasker decided to crash. Apparently when this happened all 60 kwords of magnetic core were automatically dumped to the computer room line printer. Normally this system would come back up right away, but it didn't for the rest of the day. I found out why later on when I was called on the carpet for putting "inappropriate" materials on the school computer, and because I had wasted several hours of programmer time because they were poring over the core dump trying to find more limericks and laughing so hard they couldn't be bothered to restart the system.

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[slazar]

There was a man named ScrewMaster
Who got nabbed during a mainframe disaster
He got called in
"It's not a cardinal sin!
Curse that good-for-nothing multitasker."

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[dodobh]

Dear government,

All my secret stuff is hidden in the porn. The encrypted stuff is just to lead you down a false trail.

Re:Dearest Slashdot Readers,

[jbridge21]

hahahaha

Anyone out there care to comment?

[El Cubano]

Out of curiousity, how much is the average supercomputer utilized? I mean, out of a 24 hour day, how much of that time does the supercomputer stay at >50% utilization? What is considered "full" utilization? Every CPU at >x% load? y of z CPUs at >x% load?

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[ottothecow]

I would think (given the way many of them lease out time) that many supercomputers run at pretty high utilization most of the time.

People prepare the simulations or calculations that need to be run and estimate a block of time needed. They then give that to the operators and request said block of time. The operators run the simulation as soon as that block is available.

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[DyslexicLegume]

I'm guessing quite a bit...at least SETI's computers. If they need to have a program called SETI@home to borrow proccessing power from other computers...then theirs SHOULD be running at full load.

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[saratchandra]

I've been using several supercomputers for my research project. Most of them are very busy. Eg. On the IBM P690(Cheetah) at Oakridge National labs,you have to wait for a week to get your 512 processor job scheduled. This is an extremely busy system. On the other hand,you have systems like the Itaniun cluster at NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) which schedules your jobs a lot quicker. Actually you can check out the usage of this cluster online at http://tg-monitor.ncsa.teragrid.org/ (don't slashdot it, it is quite useful to a lot of researchers :-) )

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if they get any kind of use like the supercomputers used in the academic areas I've experienced it would be 100% cpu ALL THE TIME.

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Doppler00]

My guess is that most super computers are at 100% load. The reason being is that after you have spent millions on a new computer system that will be obsolete in two years, you want to get all the utilization out of it you can get in that time. Of course, this probably requires careful planning to queue simulations into the machine to reduce idle time.

It's not like there is one screen with a researcher typing his code away at it. They probably test their code on lesser computers (a simple array of desktops) before deploying it on the big machines.

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Kontinuum]

You can watch the load on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications online system monitor.

I can't tell you what all the little widgets mean though. All I know is that while they may be informative, they can't beat the cool blinky lights of the old Connection Machine

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[viva_fourier]

yeah, many supercomputers some sort of this scheduling-latency problem -- it would be interesting to find out how much "computing" could be accomplished on normal 3GHz PC's for the amount of backed jobs...

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Anonymous Coward]

> (don't slashdot it, it is quite useful to a lot of researchers :-) )

Is that a dare?

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[icehawk55]

You'll find that outside of a single user/job using the whole system that running roughly 80% full load is a good number. Imagine you have a 256 node system. That's 256 compute nodes plus the misc file system nodes, interactive nodes, etc... Now each node has 8 cpu's and 16 gb of ram. (take the IBM p655 cluster as an example) Now you have 50 to 100 users, each user is doing different research. Some are memory bound, some cpu bound, and some (a few) are communications bound. Now, How do you get several hundred to several thousand of these misc codes pumped through a single cluster? Job "A" runs on 128 nodes and 1024 processors and takes about 7 hours. Job 2-40 run on 2 to 128 nodes and take anyware from 1 to 72 hours. Etc etc... It's like a crazy 3 dimensional game of tetris. With the X axis being nodes, Y access being processors, and the Z axis being run time. Plus Queue structures, priority jobs, etc.. IE.. Running 80% or so in a diverse environment is actually pretty good. Sad to say.. Icehawk.

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Actually you can check out the usage of this cluster online at http://tg-monitor.ncsa.teragrid.org/

That ancient console video game on the webpage looks pretty cool but what are the rules of it and which key to move the little spaceship around?

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tg-monitor.ncsa.teragrid.org/

Well, after clicking on the Reservations Link it appears to be that the system is, in fact, not busy at all:

Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /var/www/html/maui-current.php on line 49

There are currently no jobs scheduled.

Warning: main(maui-pend.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/html/maui-res.php on line 93

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required 'maui-pend.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/html/maui-res.php on line 93

Re:Anyone out there care to comment?

[Frumious Wombat]

For posting that link to Slashdot I hope NCSA throws a yellow flag and puts you in the penalty box.

On the previous cluster I managed, I always wanted a Penalty Box for certain users. I figured a PDP-11/70 running G77 would suffice.

Yawn....

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when I can own a Matrioshka Brain.

Origins of "whopping" term.

[AtariAmarok]

"Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance? "

The use of this dates back to the "WOPR" strategic simulations supercomputer used by the Pentagon. Most know it from the documentary film "WarGames". It looked like a locomotive, but boy could it calculate. For several years, it was the standard by which supercomputers were measured. Eventually they came out with faster computers: once twice as fast as the WOPR ran at "two wops", one three times as fas "four wops". Eventually, an H got added in, and as computers left the old WOPR in the dust, the term "whopping" came to mean "Yeah, bud, it's really fast!"

Want to play a game, Professor Falken?

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[mph]

Eventually, an H got added in, and as computers left the old WOPR in the dust, the term "whopping" came to mean "Yeah, bud, it's really fast!"

An excellent example of H-infix.

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[iroll]

whopping adj, (ca. 1625 ): extremely large, also: EXTRAORDINARY, INCREDIBLE
---Merriam Webster Dictionary

(didn't get the joke, but hopes there was one there for the +5 funny :D)

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[NotTheEgg]

If it makes a noise like a 100,000 people all saying "whop" at once, I don't want anything to do with it.

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[noidentity]

I've seen the new WOPR. Not much has changed, except the whole room glows since they replaced the outdated orange LEDs with really cool deep blue LEDs.

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[Anonymous Coward]

That analysis of the letter H was just way too deep for its own good

Re:Origins of "whopping" term.

[aliasptr]

From the Oxford English Dictionary:
whopping, ppl. a.
colloq. or vulgar.

That whops; almost always fig., that is a 'whopper'; abnormally large or great; 'whacking', 'thumping'.

Rarely spec. (a) monstrously false; (b) of surpassing excellence, uncommonly good, first-rate. Also quasi-adv. = hugely, immensely.

a1625 R. G. in Stanley Papers I. (Chetham Soc.) 50 Our Chroniclers..stowed their volumes with wapping Tales of my Lord Maiors Horse. 1706 E. WARD Wooden World Diss. (1708) 98 See him in bad Weather, in his Fur-Cap and whapping large Watch-Coat. 1818 SCOTT Rob Roy xxiii, A wapping weaver he was, and wrought my first pair o' hose. 1836 HALIBURTON Clockm. Ser. I. xvii. (1839) 61 What a wappin large place that would make. 1851 Amer. Mag. Nov. 113 A couple of 'whopping' pumpkin stories. 1869 Punch 31 July 34/1 That's a wopping majority against us. 1881 FREEMAN in Stephens Life & Lett. (1895) II. 224 The Turk comes down with a whopping bit of oppression now and then, but leaves you alone between whiles.

So it appears the word appeared nearly 358 years before WarGames. And its current form predates the movie by 132 years. Of course this was modded funny but I'll totally miss the point and post some word etymology. I'll save you all also from the root word etymology. If you like the OED check out "The Professor and The Madman". A great book about one of the most prolific contributors to the OED who also happened to be insane.

I don't like SPAM

[ankhcraft]

All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

Increase the size of my private ... and strengthen ... wait a sec! Ya' trying to sneak some SPAM past us?

Re:I don't like SPAM

[Anonymous Coward]

UTT@RL33 S0FoMORR1K!! Y,M PiSSGUST1D!!

Re:I don't like SPAM

[sharkey]

Ya' trying to sneak some SPAM past us?

You must be new here.

imagine a beowulf cluster of these

[Anonymous Coward]

..sorry

Private Supercomputers

[count_zero011]

It's no big secret that many of the most powerful supercomputers are not shown off to the press. For example, in regards to the comment about cryptography, the NSA reportedly has enormous supercomputers that are never shown to the press. And of the ones that are, few are connected to the outside world. I believe right now the fastest is the Seaborg computer at the Berkeley Lab.

Re:Private Supercomputers

[ottothecow]

You would think that for being the "flagship scientific computing facility" they could afford a better digital camera...

Re:Private Supercomputers

[saratchandra]

The Seaborg system is not the fastest one around. I personally have worked on more powerful systems than that like Tungsten at NCSA.(currently ranked 10th in the top 500)

Yea, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but can it run the Battlefield 2 demo?

if unfamiliar with BF2, please sub-in Doom 3. Thank you.

Longhorn Compatible?

[Sir_Jeff]

Maybe this is the only computer that will run longhorn at a reasonable speed.

As impressive as it is

[hobotron]

Im waiting for Sherlock Holmes Blue Gene system.

It's not the biggest, but,

[pair-a-noyd]

I have a complete, operational, DG MV30000. And for private ownership by a civilian, that's pretty cool..

(the link is to a sales brochure page)

Re:It's not the biggest, but,

[pair-a-noyd]

crap, wrong image link, sorry.. Here's the right one..
http://www.simulogics.com/nostalgia/DG/MV/MV_30000 .jpg

Re:It's not the biggest, but,

[kibbey]

Used to be an AOS/VS admin in the ancient days... Nothing like big iron!

Re:It's not the biggest, but,

[mvdw]

Cool computer. Tried to reach the web link in your .sig, but it timed out...

Re:It's not the biggest, but,

[Antonymous Flower]

why are you running it at 320x240 :(

Re:It's not the biggest, but,

[vondo]

I used to use an MV8000 in college (early 90s and it was old then). It's entertaining to see the specs on this machine. Runs at up to 19 MIPS and takes up to 256 MB of RAM.

Nothing compared to Bluen Gene L

[Gates82]

Blue Gene L has been under construction at Lawrence Livermore Labs, by IBM. It broke the 100 TF mark months ago, and is only 1/2 way done at 180TF. It is expected reach 360 TF's when complete. And it uses Intel Processors, so the first post is irrelevant about Apple switching to Intel and moving from IBM.

Link to Blue Gene

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:Nothing compared to Bluen Gene L

[Gates82]

Better correct myself before someone else does. Further research reveals that yes it is power PC based, so my apologies to the first post.

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:Nothing compared to Bluen Gene L

[Gates82]

Here are the pictures

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:Nothing compared to Bluen Gene L

[Anonymous Coward]

If your RTFA, you will see that this computer IS a BlueGene/L base system. You are are full of shit about BlueGene/L using Intel processors. It uses dual-core PowerPC-based ASICs.

Ahem

[eh2o]

Is it also whopping?

Re:Ahem

[metachor]

Is it also privately-owned?

Seen by the press~ hyped by IBM!

[screwthemoderators]

A new accomplishment in corporate hype, IBM has promoted another BS benchmark- 92 Whopping Flops!
There may be "computers not seen by the press" that are faster, but they don't have as much interest in hyping misleading stats out of context hence the introduction of the "whopping flop!"

What you can't buy with money

[antispam_ben]

The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned. ... but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.

Then what do they use to pay their mathematicians? Coffee?

Re:What you can't buy with money

[slavemowgli]

That's beside the point. The point *is* that you can't just go out and buy knowledge and scientific progress like you can buy fast computers.

Re:What you can't buy with money

[Dunbal]

you can't just go out and buy knowledge and scientific progress like you can buy fast computers.

Sure you can. It's called funding the research. the more you fund, the more likely it is that you end up backing a real winner. But if the mathematician has to teach at a high school or drive a taxi to feed himself, well, there won't be much progress made now will there?

Re:What you can't buy with money

[PingPongBoy]

Well well well. It seems that there really is some intuition in the idea that mathematics cannot be purchased per unit like fruit in a grocery store.

Paying for mathematic research is definitely liable to result in quality mathematical ideas, but intuition about the intangibles:

A. We may hit a barrier that no real gain in mathematics can be obtained regardless of how much money is humanly available.

For instance, suppose computers become intelligent and perform mathematic discovery very quickly. In the limit all resources that can be spent on mathematics will be - a sort of barrier.

At any rate, the automatic discovery of mathematics is a kind of algorithm for mathematics, less than an ability to prove everything true with finite resources, but capable of proving everything that can be paid for along a finite set of thought lines.

There is the problem of being forced to choose and thus consume resources, on the assumption that even a quantum computer cannot consider all choices. But who knows? It may be possible for a computer to handle all elements of infinite sets, maybe even uncountable sets!! Mathematics and physical reality may have far more in common than what we can tell.

B. Mathematics per dollar - a genius might see a solution quickly while an organization spends billions going nowhere. Did Fermat really know a proof but the NSA could have (and may have) dumped untold money while Wiles put the pieces together all by himself.

C. The result belongs to the mathematician first. Perhaps the proof becomes obvious but if it isn't a mathematician funded by the NSA could foresee a wonderful conclusion and find a more lucrative buyer.

Ultimately the human race can purchase mathematics but the NSA is a tiny bit more limited.

Re:What you can't buy with money

[Mao]

I do want to point out that if you are a mathematician with the ability to seriously advance mathematics, it would totally suck to not be able to publish any of your major results. If a high stature mathematician is willing to work for NSA and risk not being able to publish work which he/she has done in his capcity as a NSA researcher, he/she most likely is in it for more than just money.

I do wonder, suppose some NSA guy proves the Riemann's hypothesis. What would they do? How far does patriotism go?

Re:What you can't buy with money

[Maxo-Texas]

OTH,
How cool is it to work with other mathemeticians on math and science that is years ahead of the rest of the world. How much money is that worth?

Is it worth the ability to publish to know you may be working on problems that the someone at the NSA solved 10 years ago?

Re:What you can't buy with money

[piovere]

A mathematician is a device for converting coffee into theorems

Hope they didn't pay much

[MaverickUW]

I hope IBM didn't have to pay a lot for that. I mean that's what, only 45 Playstation 3's?

Re:Hope they didn't pay much

[Anonymous Coward]

I think i'll get one when they come down in price.
Just in time for Duke Forever :-D

Re:Hope they didn't pay much

[Anonymous Coward]

The PS3's Cell CPU is only capable of something like 0.238 teraflops. The overall system performance of 2 teraflops comes from the 1.8 teraflops of the "RSX" which while can do 3D maths fast it probably wouldn't hold up as a "proper" CPU.

Re:Hope they didn't pay much

[djdanlib]

Considering that large quantities of matrix math (which is exactly what 3D processors do) are otherwise extremely time consuming on general purpose "proper CPUs", using a massive network of PS3s for their matrix math handling would probably be very cost-efficient.

I don't need this from slashdot

[iamatlas]

...to increase the size of your private key...

I get enough of these kinds of spam emails already. I don't need to start seeing this on the front page of Slashdot too.

Yes, but can it...

[MisterLawyer]

Some more info can be found the IBM site.

So, the big question is whether this supercomputer will have the whopping ability to check spelling and grammar.

But the PS3 is a super computer!

[Anonymous Coward]

So if this thing is considered a super computer and Ken Kutaragi claims that the PS3 is also a super computer than can I expect the PS3 to perform as well as this thing? Or have I been lied to? DAMN YOU SONY!!

Beat This

[ad1]

Beat This Intel for trying to steal my customer!

Re:Beat This

[kmmatthews]

Uhm, the IBM system is actually using Intel processors...

Re:Beat This

[Anonymous Coward]

uh...no

PPC with embedded dram and two of the "G5" FPUs tacked on to make it nice and fast.

Lawrence Livermore Labs keeps all...

[Anonymous Coward]

the G5 PowerPC chips that were destined for Apple in a new blue trunk... (updating a very old 'cookie' message)

Nice!

[Duncan3]

Almost 1/2 a Folding@home, I'm 1/2 impressed ;)

Holy interconnect batman!

Hey guys!

[__aamcgs2220]

I only need another 2,591,501 of you to sign up for just a measly, diminutive, insignificant, minuscule, teensy-weensy little 3,520,725 offers so I can get one of these whopping supercomputers for free!

That's why...

[ilyanep]

You never pretend you have privacy so you're never disappointed.

Re:Imagine......

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame the only person to post this joke has the world's worst karma EVAR.

I mean, come on, people, this is pure gold here!

DC?

[ilyanep]

How come nobody counts Distributed Computing as Supercomputers? I'm sure many of the BOINC Projects (SETI@Home at berkeley, E@H at UWM, etc.) have close or even higher than that.

Re:DC?

[Kontinuum]

I suppose part of it is the difficulty in benchmarking. It's a hard enough task when you've got all your processors sitting in front of you. With a distributed computing system, you can't very well ask everyone to not touch their computer for a few hours on Wednesday at noon. Additionally, it takes a long time to distribute information across distribution computing systems. So your timing would be subject to all the events that affect network speed around the world. In the end, you'd probably find that for some only modestly gigantic problems that they use for benchmarking supercomputers, you might be better off not using the whole grid, but only a few thousand of your best clients (people sitting on high speed networks using very powerful, possibly multiprocessor machines).

That being said, as has been said in every discussion about supercomputing and distributed computing, the set of problems for which traditional supercomputers are designed is typically very different from distributed computing problems. Perhaps some altogether different measure of computing capacity would be more appropriate for distributed computing.

Re:DC?

[mvdw]

Perhaps a decent measure would be to average the processing out over a week or so; eg each seti@home unit is, say, 1e9 floating point operations, calculate how many units are processed in a week, divide by seconds in a week, there's your number. This method allows for the redundancy of the @home method, ie, each unit will be computed a number of times, if only the completed units are counted it gives a measure of true (sustained) performance.

Re:DC?

[Kaenneth]

I would suggest some standardised physics application, perhaps a model of a set of different shapes of windmills, at a set of wind speeds, driving a water pump.

And what makes you think...

[PaulBu]

... that NSA would be interested in teraFLops? Last time I checked, their kind of processing required manipulating bits (in weird ways), not imprecise floating point numbers. Go to DOE to pay for FLOPS...

Not that I'd know, but I can still guess... ;-)

Paul B.

Re:And what makes you think...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a lot of reasearch these days involves fuzzy logic, so its reasonable to assume that the NSA mathematicians are playing with floats.

Most bit ops (like cracking modern crypto) are done on FPGAs anyway, so conventional chips wouldnt be used much for them anyway.

Well, how about this for an idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

They may have the resources, and the know how, and the terraflops to back it up, and the press in their pocket, and the respect of their peers, and a whole bunch of other stuff that you and I can only dream of.....

But they don't have the gumption, the guile, the tenacity, the ability to hold their beer to compete with our combined resources and know how.

I say, plan your 2006 vacation period as a time to convene in one location, whereever people most want, somewhere sunny that has a lot of beer on tap. A few thousand /.ers show up, each one hauling a bag of parts, anything from an Apple ][ to a Pentium II, to a G5. We do what we can to weld the whole thing together in a bucket of ice, give it a cool name like "super conducting thermo-death fast proc dooffer". And see if we could hack and bash a 'sooooper computer' out of all the parts none of use would use anymore.

Of course, we wouldn't call it a super computer, we'd call it something meaningful, like 'localhost' or 'tux' or something cool like that.

And we'd never get it to work, but we'd insist to the press that an unnamed 'agency' took it off our hands because of fears of what it would do to the market.

But we'd insist that it was a major breakthough. A 2187 bit system (3^7) which encompasses everything from the hodge-podge instruction sets that we were left to deal with, 1864 of the address registers are used just to apply coolant to what is affectionately called the "hamsters' cage" - the main source of power for the box which is fuelled by flamewars.

And all the fuss over how we were crackpots being reported in the media would all be weeks over by the time we stopped drinking and returned to our real jobs - until next year to do the whole thing over.

I reckon it could only take 50 annual vacations to actually get something that works.

That's a lot of drinking... anyone game?

Thank you...

[kmmatthews]

for pointing out how harmful the reduction of math in public education really is. :)

I am sure the NSA

[elgee]

I am sure one of the NSA's whoppers is thrashing away on this thread as we speak and write.

Imagine...

[quanticle]

A beowulf cluster of these...

Re:Imagine...

[djdanlib]

You'd need a Beowulf cluster of power plants.

Something that can't be taken down?

[piano-in-a-box]

What we need to do, is all pitch in for a slashdot immune supercomputer with a disgusting amount of bandwidth used solely for the purpose of mirroring the contents of every link posted on /. as soon as it's posted so that it won't be slashdotted the moment it appears.

encryption is for wimps

[weighn]

Besides, I tend to make up my own encryption scheme for truly sensitive pictu^H^H^H^H^Hdocuments and then just delete the method.

Pussy

Re:encryption is for wimps

[St. Arbirix]

Pussy

Right, and I encrypt the stuff because I'd like to *keep* getting it.

Re:encryption is for wimps

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if you're hiding your porn from your girlfriend because she doesn't approve of it, you need to check your pimp game.

If you're hiding your porn from your girlfriend because she won't accept you if she sees it, you need to get realistic with yourself about your homosexuality and stop stringing her along.

Re:encryption is for wimps

[St. Arbirix]

O_o
I encrypt it because the pictures are of her. I'm not hiding them from her, I'm protecting them so no one else but us would see them.

Re:encryption is for wimps

[weighn]

I encrypt it because the pictures are of her.

oh I see now. Your girlfriend is a minor and you make porn.
Encryption wont save you.

You mean GCHQ

[Anonymous Coward]

The Brit's GCHQ developed public key encryption.

Re:You mean GCHQ

[finkployd]

Both did, and I doubt we will ever really know which did it first (we know when GCHQ did, not when the NSA did).

Finkployd

This begs the question..

[AutopsyReport]

So then, who is the world's largest nerd?

Re:is it really possible to cluster ps3?

[lymph]

I'm no Linux genius, but could you cluster a bunch of ps3's together. I know they sell a linux kit for ps2's.

Pizza is like a motherboard, hot and messy.

Real question is....

[nsasch]

How many hours does it take to install Gentoo (stage1)?

My Computer Running Windows

[kai.chan]

Fastest privately owned supercomputer? That would be my computer running Windows. It has a record of Always-Flops.

Re:My Computer Running Windows

[EverDense]

Fastest privately owned supercomputer? That would be my computer running Windows. It has a record of Always-Flops.

Sounds like your computer needs some of that "Virtual Viagra" I keep getting e-mails about.

panic time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm sure anyone who could afford a piece of equipment like that would spend their time breaking into your online banking and viewing your porn collection.

how long would it take this to crack a 128 bit ssl

[Anonymous Coward]

i always see shit like 'it would take the most powerful computers millions of years to crack this'. specifically on thawte's site where they are talking about 128 bit ssl certs.

how long would it take a 100 TF supercomputer to crack a 128 bit ssl cert?

I've been trying!

[ScrewMaster]

... if it's time to increase the size of your private key ...

I've been trying to increase the size of my private key, but those little blue "enhancement" pills didn't do anything for me.

Re:I've been trying!

[Anonymous Coward]

People expiriencing keys in excess of 4 hours should seek cryptographic help immediatly....

"Strengthen(ing) your encryption"

[Anonymous Coward]

All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

So instead of taking 3 billion years for all the known supercomputers to factor my 2048-bit RSA key, it will only take 2.5 billion years.

Re:"Strengthen(ing) your encryption"

[speculatrix]

I'd love to know what the RC5-72 key-cracking rate on this machine is.

Fastest I've personally witnessed is 38Mkeys/s on a dual G5, 18Mk/s on a dual opteron.

Anyone from IBM care to visit http://www.distributed.net/download/clients.php and download/build/run and report the results?

Re:"Strengthen(ing) your encryption"

[rbarreira]

Well, unless one of NSA's mathematicians has already cracked RSA :)

Well it won't buy happiness

[winkydink]

but they can buy them a 120 ft Cabin Cruiser that they can use to pull up along side of it.

Meanwhile

[Orion Blastar]

IBM couldn't market themselves out of a paper bag since they used Charlie Chaplin to represent their PC line of computers. No wonder Microsoft took a lot of the market away from them.

Will this become the world's fastest privetly pwn3d Supercomputer once it is on the Internet? Got Unix exploits and script-kiddies?

But computing power increases exponentially

[antispam_ben]

So instead of taking 3 billion years for all the known supercomputers to factor my 2048-bit RSA key, it will only take 2.5 billion years.

That is of course using a current computer, which will never go any faster (and presuming it actually has 100 percent uptime for 2.5 billion years - must be running Linux).

At the current rate of computing power, and presuming for a moment that the "computer" this thing runs on increases in speed exponentially to match the rate of growth of computing speed, how long will it take?

25,000 years?

250 years?

25+ years (we hit The Singularity in 25 years, IT does it in 25 milliseconds) ?

Re:But computing power increases exponentially

[Anonymous Coward]

At the current rate of computing power, and presuming for a moment that the "computer" this thing runs on increases in speed exponentially to match the rate of growth of computing speed, how long will it take?

I did not take into Moore's Law, but making that assumption and assuming further advances in factoring techniques, we get the following figures:

http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=200 4

Assuming that Moore's Law continues to hold for eight more generations, and starting with estimates based on the Blaze et al. report above, it would take a $10 million machine 10 days with year 2015 technology to search for an 80-bit key -- which even in 2015 should still be a lot of money for most keys. However, many keys will have greater value, and key size recommendations have a history of taking longer to be fully embraced than one might prefer (consider the lengthy process of upgrading DES). Accordingly, an earlier transition would seem prudent, consistent with the higher security level of 90 bits encouraged by the Blaze et al. report [BDR+96] for protecting data through that time period.

The next level in NIST's schedule is the 112-bit security level, matching triple-DES encryption. To put the 112-bit security level in concrete terms, some simple calculations may be done. Starting with the estimates for 80-bit key search today, a 112-bit key search today on a $10 million machine would take about 30 billion years. A machine with the same cost in the year 2030 -- 18 generations from now -- would take over 100,000 years to do a 112-bit key search. (There is clearly dispute over whether Moore's Law will hold that long, so this is only a starting point for analysis.)

Taking the previously established correspondence between 2048-bit RSA keys and the 112-bit security level as a starting point, one may assume that a "future TWIRL" in 2030 would likewise take 100,000 years to factor a 2048-bit RSA key. It could take more time, due to the larger circuit size. More likely, it would take less, as there may be further improvements in integer factorization. Conservatively applying Lenstra and Verheul's "law", i.e., incorporating 18 "generations" of such improvements, a $10 million "future TWIRL" in the year 2030 would take about five months to factor a 2048-bit RSA key. This brings us essentially back to TWIRL's initial claims for 1024-bit RSA keys today.

So, worrying about encryption key sizes because of a couple supercomputers the NSA might have is silly.

folding@home

[dwellersire]

So who wants to rent this bad boy out to fold for team slashdot on folding@home? Then you can brag about your score to the.... um.... like 10 slashdotters who actually fold.

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=t eampage&teamnum=11326/

Private key enlargement pills

[Anonymous Coward]

Save 50% on private key enlargement pills.
Discreet and safe, no side effects!
Buy the Private Key Enlargement Pills on sale today, for only $19.95

Hah! Shows what they know!

[serutan]

The largest privately owned supercomputer is the one in my secret underground laboratory.
Oops! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H

Security

[buss_error]

All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

Real Security starts when you don't use computers to transfer the data. Very sensitive data (to the holder) frequently goes by encrypted, time limited, self destruct if handled wrong, media paths. Not over the Internet. Sneaker net on steriods, in other words.

What kind of data is handled that way? One time pad transfers for banking, [REDACTED], and [REDACTED], for starters.

Hmmm... ever get a creepy feeling between your sholder blades that someone is watching you....?

Old Supercomputers

[coaxial]

I want to know what happens to old super computers. Then can be used for quite (10 years max?) while since the parallelism is what's more important than the individual raw processor speed, Do they sell them or what?

Re:Old Supercomputers

[joib]

Well, the Cray T3E they used to have at the supercomputer center where I submit my stuff was dismantled and the pieces thrown into a big trash bin in the yard. *sniff*

The life of a supercomputer is AFAIK really closer to 5 years than 10. It's not that they aren't impressive machines even 5 years old, it's just that they use _lots_ of power and floor space. Looking at how much computing per $ you can do, it's just cheaper to replace them with something new than to keep them running.

Re:Old Supercomputers

[flaming-opus]

Except when you can't replace them.
There is a government customer downloading data from satelites and doing some post-processing on the data. (I don't know what data, or what sort of processing they did, just that they needed it to be fast). They built a network of 6 cray T90's, and a bunch of solid-state-disk. Towards the end of the 5-year life-cycle of the machine they tried to replace it with something faster, but couldn't. Cray had stopped making vector machines, and the cray/IBM/SGI/etc distributed machines could not deal with the huge I/O load the system needed to handle. They had to limp along with the old cray's for 3 or 4 more years before anyone could produce a machine that could actually do the work. [Even in the mid 90's the cray had 24GB/s of memory bandwidth. Ten years later an itanium2 has 6.4GB/s of bandwidth. You see the problem.]

Damn Straight!

[MarcQuadra]

Then what do they use to pay their mathematicians? Coffee?

Yes, in a way. I have a friend who is just INTO that sort of thing and wants nothing more than to have a fat paycheck for just being some guy who can figure that stuff out in his head.

So far, he's headed in that direction, he does super-low-level math for his university and the NSA for free under his professor, and he enjoys it.

Good coffee can go a long way if there's a reasonable expectation of a similar paycheck behind it.

And BTW, John, keep it up, you staying ahead of us by two steps keeps the OSS movement one step ahead of the rest of the world!

Yes but

[squeee]

which linux distro would you put on it?

Re:Yes but

[Anonymous Coward]

SUSE RTFA

Re:Yes but

[slashflood]

Gentoo

Yeah, well

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried building my own supercomputer in the basement, and it was a whopping flop.

FPS

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder how many FPS this super computer can run quake?

I hate the tinfoil hats

[Hanzo]

"All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption."

I friggin` hate comments like this. Being "secure" is nothing more than putting up enough barriers to frustrate/annoy someone long enough that they lose interest.

A comment like this implies that someone with this type of metal would have nothing better to do than read my email about the weekend.

This quote gets a rating of Retard, +10

Sounds like a real whopper

[Urusai]

I got a northbridge in Brooklyn to sell ya, too.

don't yell...

[DualG5GUNZ]

I know someone's going to object to this given all the press that technology towards quantum computing is getting BUT... I'm inside the beltway (DC Metro Area) and there are folks--in the know--who speculate The Agency (NSA) already has a quantum computer.... so much for conventional security.

Wonderances

[GoClick]

No but I bet it would only take it a day or two to compile it!

Ever wonder how much processing power Google has between all of their systems and all of the Google tool bars running around?

Has anyone ever wondered if MS or Yahoo has tried or is currently using their various browser bars to provide distributed computing?

Has anyone ever wondered if they buy insurance on these things for stuff like faulty processor design? Like the Pentium bug? I mean how'd you like to build this thing and the find out all of the processors have a bug?

Has anyone wondered if you have software on your machine that fouled a browser bar's data somehow if you're responsible?

Re:Wonderances

[CTho9305]

Most processors are at least a little bit faulty.

All

[Anonymous Coward]

All your FLOPS are belong to us!

Re:Dearest PGP Users,

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry guys but the .gov made me an offer I didn't want to refuse. Since none of you troubled to read the source of PGP 5.x and above, all PGP/GPG is now backdoored!

Uncle Sam has your Private Key in Escrow - only for use in counteracting the plots of the Evil Terrorists you understand.

It is for your own good, friend citizen.

Love,

Phil [lip R Zimmerman]

+++++BEGIN PGP SIG
Ah what the hell...you know who it is

Who 0wns the largest supercomputer?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

29A probably has the largest...

Although some russian hacker-spammers may own an even larger one, which is used to calculate e-mail texts with reproductive organs upgrade programme advertisement in them which are specially crafted to defeat e-mail filters...

Their super computer is sponsored by burger king

[tod_miller]

They are bringing out the double whopper 180 teraflops soon, with 'have it your way' clustering, and a free coke.

Wow, imagine a beo....

[Orlando]

nah, can't say it.

Whoah!

[minginqunt]

That's like as powerful as *fifty* PlayStation 3s, all working together!!!

Can you imagine?

What about Stenography

[xlioilx]

Along with Strong Encryption, Stenography always helps!

Re:What about Stenography

[Russellkhan]

OK, I guess shorthand is very efficient, but who has time to learn how to use one of those weird chording keyboards that stenographers use?

Of course...

[Kjella]

...the NSA has a "mission impossible". They are supposed to a) Secure national systems with unbreakable cryptography and b) Be able to break cryptosystems. So how do you provide one, without really giving up the ability to the other? You can try operating in that really narrow space between "what a layman/corporation/hostile government can do" and "what NSA can do" but well, that is a pretty slim corridor.

Being able to throw 1000x the computing power on it is a dangerous game to play - that would be "just out of reach" for the rest. Relying on mathematical advances is also difficult - who knows what the enemy has discovered? I tend to think it is mostly game over, the "secret" of secure encryption is out in many implementations.

Kjella

Re:Of course...

[rvega]

First of all, and I apologize for being pedantic, cryptographic systems are not unbreakable, just (very) difficult to break. As far as I know, only random, one-time pads are unbreakable, but impractical because of the key-exchange problem (ie, how do you securely transport the key?)

I think the space in which the NSA is operating, in addition to the one you mention, is the space between the time one needs to transmit a secure message, and the time when it no longer matters if someone intercepts that message. For example, it wouldn't have done the Germans a bit of good to decode certain pieces of Allied communications the day after D-Day. In terms of practical cryptography, there's an important difference between "this can't be broken" and "YOU can't break this, at least not NOW."

In these terms, staying "just out of reach" is all that's necessary. When the United States is no longer in a position to stay just slightly ahead of the competition, the NSA's mission, like that of the entire nation's, will have dramatically changed.

Minor Mistake...

[Bad to the Ben]

Actually, the NSA didn't beat Diffie and Hellman to the punch, it was the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) of the United Kingdom, in particular a man named James Ellis. It's mentioned in the "Science of Secrecy" book you linked to, page 166.

I don't even think the NSA was around back in the 60's when this was going on.

Re:Minor Mistake...

[Kiryat Malachi]

I don't even think the NSA was around back in the 60's when this was going on.

Yes. They were.

"The National Security Agency was created in November 1952."

And as far as is known, they may well have beaten GCHQ to it, but there's no verifiable record that they did - they say they did, but it's up to you whether you believe them.

And the next step would be Mycroft ...

[svejoh]

... as in Holmes IV.

--
Why is a laser beam like a goldfish?

You just wait

[Amouth]

till i make a cluster out of x360's or ps3's get 100 of either and it will be cheeper than this thing

Why wait to increase encryption

[oshy]

"All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption." Depends if you dont mind someone reading your old messages. Your old ones could be stored on someones Gmail account untill its viable to crack. As long as theres nothing in them you dont mind getting out its not a problem (like that afair you had while your wife was pregnant)

Re:Why wait to increase encryption

[oshy]

D'oh, I keep forgetting about the default formatting in this place.

compression?

[GuniGuGu]

i need your disk compression tool!

my 'programs' take up nearly 10 gigs

Re:compression?

[Haydn Fenton]

Unfortunately it's not a disk compression tool that keeps it that "low", it's the fact I'm on a 56gay modem.

Or

[TubeSteak]

David: How about Global Thermonuclear War?

WOPR: Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it run Linux?

google's file server?

[peter303]

Estimates are that google's file server farm(s) contain about 200,000 P4s and several petabytas of disk. These are not organized for parallel computation, but for parallel file access.

Re:NSA... teraflops?

[seven of five]

I doubt that the NSA would do encryption & cracking on a general purpose machine using floating point.

Wouldn't they be better off using a custom built processor with hardware optimized for the job?

Re:is it really possible to cluster ps3?

[GTRacer]

Are you asking about the PS3 clustering possibilities because you know about the PS2 cluster at NCSA, or because you think it can be done with Linux on board?

GTRacer
- Needs 68 more PS2s...

Re:NSA... teraflops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any of you ever read 'Digital Fortress' by Dan Brown? It is quite entertaining and deals with the NSA and what kind of power they may have.

Damn Dick Cheney

[AtariAmarok]

"Rarely spec. (a) monstrously false;....1836 HALIBURTON....

Damn him and his stupid time machine.

Units?

[Guppy06]

"reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops"

What is that in real units, like bogomips?

Re:Units?

[chawly]

Your idea has merit "Liberté, egalité, fraternité" where I live it is the fashion. But for priorites how about " Liberté, egalité, sororité " Slightly more amusing, I suggest.

2 cents (ha-ha)

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty impressiv if you can cough up the cash.
it just saddens me abit after reading the pdf docu
and visiting the LBueGen website and looking at
the photos of it, that they might have some really
interessing equipment and stuff, but have forgot
the overall design completly. i mean the whole
setup is a mess. happy i don't have manage that. i
mean just look at the building lay-out ...
terrible. i mean can't they at least try to make
the whole thing look a bit symmetric? a clever
floor plane can save you some cabling head-aches.
also it sstrikes me odd that there are like 22'000
nods but only 1000 gigabit ports. well i guess
their computing needs don't need that much network
capacity then.
would be cool tho to have a node be at
what-ever physical particle and the network
functioning as the "space-time". of course you
could only simulate a 22k atom body :P this
"setup" would require every node at all times
to be able to "speak" to every other node.
wouldn't make much sense if it one "atom-node"
couldn't "interact with another "atom-node"
because there's too much traffic in the
"network-space/time" :P
have fun anyways!

Re:2 cents (ha-ha)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday after noon, IBM launched it's own Watson & Samuels Blue8 CPU Gene system, the largest from the many privately owned sub-atomic supercompuers seen by the press. The super-computer was described after a breakfast while reaching into a whopping 9100.000+e29 teraflops (for each node). IBM executive Steve Jobs, said that he has plans on giving Academic researchers some access to some of the computing time when the super computer isn't doing anything else and hasn't done so for about more than a week. Some more info could be found the IBM site before it was haxx0red. All this makes some one wonder are there any and if yes what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press. It's time to increase the size of your penis and strengthen your erection by the way?

Open source test farm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

Re:is it really possible to cluster ps3?

[lymph]

I realized after I posted I could just google the answer. I'm a moron. The first thing that popped up was the NCSA site.

While it seems like a nice trick to cluster 70 ps2's, it doesn't seem very usefull. Even the article I read said they were having problems firguring out what to do with the cluster, cause each node has only 32megs.

Re:What about Steganography

[xlioilx]

Sorry I mean Steganography, It was late and I am forgetting how to spell...duh! But yes you are right that would be a bit cumbersome...

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

FUNNY!!