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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."

3 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. My data isn't really all that private by Lingur · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. sure. by St.+Arbirix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:Anyone out there care to comment? by saratchandra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :-) )