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Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the beats-the-basement-beowulf-rack dept.

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."

6 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NSA... by slavemowgli · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
  2. Nothing compared to Bluen Gene L by Gates82 · · Score: 1, Informative
    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

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

  3. Re:NSA... by damiangerous · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:sure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  5. Re:What you can't buy with money by Dunbal · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  6. Re:sure. by haakoneide · · Score: 2, Informative

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