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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."
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.
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.
Direct away from face when opening.
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
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 :-) )
The Brit's GCHQ developed public key encryption.
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.
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) ?
Tag lost or not installed.