Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

50 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. REVENGE! by flawedgeek · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    My other Sig is .40 caliber.
    1. Re:REVENGE! by ottothecow · · Score: 4, Funny
      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.

      --
      Bottles.
  2. NSA... by ThomasFlip · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
    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.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    2. 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.

    3. Re:NSA... by slavemowgli · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    4. Re:NSA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  3. SHA Collisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  4. 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.

  5. A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? by metachor · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Google search of 'supercomputer whopping'.

    1. Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? by Andy_R · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  6. Pish posh... by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  7. I have a supercomputer by Nicky+G · · Score: 5, Funny

    In my pants.

    1. Re:I have a supercomputer by viva_fourier · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      and now back to the fallout shelter...
    2. Re:I have a supercomputer by psvm · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:I have a supercomputer by William+Robinson · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      hilarious
    4. Re:I have a supercomputer by Slashcrunch · · Score: 2, Funny

      I bet you drive a red sports car as well

  8. So... by codexwriter · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  9. "Seen by the Press" by DyslexicLegume · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  10. The largest PRIVATELY OWNED supercomputer? by kc32 · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  11. 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.
    1. 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

    2. Re:sure. by St.+Arbirix · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Direct away from face when opening.
    3. Re:sure. by St.+Arbirix · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      Direct away from face when opening.
    4. 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

  12. Dearest Slashdot Readers, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  13. Origins of "whopping" term. by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny
    "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?

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  14. I don't like SPAM by ankhcraft · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    --
    ...
  15. As impressive as it is by hobotron · · Score: 4, Funny


    Im waiting for Sherlock Holmes Blue Gene system.

    --
    There is truth in humor.
  16. 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 :-) )

  17. Ahem by eh2o · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is it also whopping?

    1. Re:Ahem by metachor · · Score: 2, Funny

      Is it also privately-owned?

  18. What you can't buy with money by antispam_ben · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    Tag lost or not installed.
    1. 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?

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:What you can't buy with money by Mao · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

  19. Yes, but can it... by MisterLawyer · · Score: 4, Funny
    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.

  20. Nice! by Duncan3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    Holy interconnect batman!

    --
    - Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
  21. Hey guys! by __aamcgs2220 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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!

  22. DC? by ilyanep · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    ~Ilyanep
    To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
    1. Re:DC? by Kontinuum · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:DC? by mvdw · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  23. And what makes you think... by PaulBu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... 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.

  24. My Computer Running Windows by kai.chan · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  25. I've been trying! by ScrewMaster · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... 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.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  26. But computing power increases exponentially by antispam_ben · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  27. Re:You mean GCHQ by finkployd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  28. Wonderances by GoClick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  29. Re:Old Supercomputers by joib · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  30. Whoah! by minginqunt · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    Can you imagine?

  31. Minor Mistake... by Bad+to+the+Ben · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.