World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but the
world's most
powerful supercomputer entered operation recently. 
Comprising between 1 and
10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you believe),
the Storm botnet
easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system,
BlueGene/L, with a mere
128K CPU cores.  Using the figures from Valve's online
survey,
http:/
/www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the
typical machine
has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM,
the Storm cluster
has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with
1-10 petabytes of
RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes).  In fact this
composite system has
better hardware resources than what's listed at http://www.top500.org for
the
entire world's top 10 supercomputers:

  BlueGene/L: 128K CPUs, 32TB
  Jaguar: 22K CPUs, 46TB
  Red Storm: 26K CPUs, 40TB
  BGW: 40K CPUs, 10TB
  New York Blue: 37K CPUs, 18TB
  ASC Purple: 12K CPUs, 49TB
  eServer Blue Gene: ?
  Abe: 10K CPUs, 10TB
  MareNostrum: 10K CPUs, 20GB
  HLRB-II: 10K CPUs, 39GB

This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has
been controlled not
by a government or megacorporation but by criminals.  The
question remains,
now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer
system at their
disposal, what are they going to do with it?  And I wonder
what the LINPACK 
rating for Storm is?

Peter.

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On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 06:23:57PM +1200, Peter Gutmann
wrote:
> 128K CPU cores.  Using the figures from Valve's online
survey,
> http:/
/www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the
typical machine
> has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of
RAM, the Storm cluster
> has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s
with 1-10 petabytes of
> RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes).

The Steam survey is going to overestimate the power of the
average
machine because it is only sampling machines which are
capable of
playing Half-Life 2 (or other equally resource intensive
games). The
recommended machine for Half-Life 2 is a 2.4 GHz CPU with
512 Mbytes
RAM. No surprise that most of the machines surveyed hit that
minimum.

As for "most powerful supercomputer" - that
ignores that the
interconnect used (the Internet) is going to be 2 to 4
orders of
magnitude slower in bandwidth and latency than that used in
any modern
supercomputer.

-Jack

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Peter Gutmann wrote:
> This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but
the world's most
> powerful supercomputer entered operation recently. 
Comprising between 1 and
> 10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you
believe), the Storm botnet
> easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system,
BlueGene/L, with a mere
> 128K CPU cores.  Using the figures from Valve's online
survey,
> http:/
/www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the
typical machine
> has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of
RAM, the Storm cluster
> has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s
with 1-10 petabytes of
> RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes).  In fact
this composite system has
> better hardware resources than what's listed at http://www.top500.org for
the
> entire world's top 10 supercomputers:
>
>   BlueGene/L: 128K CPUs, 32TB
>   Jaguar: 22K CPUs, 46TB
>   Red Storm: 26K CPUs, 40TB
>   BGW: 40K CPUs, 10TB
>   New York Blue: 37K CPUs, 18TB
>   ASC Purple: 12K CPUs, 49TB
>   eServer Blue Gene: ?
>   Abe: 10K CPUs, 10TB
>   MareNostrum: 10K CPUs, 20GB
>   HLRB-II: 10K CPUs, 39GB
>
> This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer
has been controlled not
> by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. 
The question remains,
> now that they have the world's most powerful
supercomputer system at their
> disposal, what are they going to do with it?  
they could probably easily compute the GSM A5 Rainbow Table
and listen
to any GSM phone connection they want 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=895
5054591690672567&hl=en

or even more evil: they compute the rainbow table und sell
it to the
highest bidder...

> And I wonder what the LINPACK 
> rating for Storm is?
>
> Peter.
>
>
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That's quite an interesting thing to ponder, but don't
forget that only 
some supercomputer applications (like crypto!) can be
handled well by this 
sort of highly distributed system.  There is more to most
"real 
supercomputers" than just MHz times number of CPUs -
there is also very 
high-speed data communications and sharing between those
multiple CPUs. 
The botnet does not have that, so it is limited to working
on problems 
that can be completely divided into independent pieces of
work where there 
is little or no need to pass data between the CPUs.  If
you're trying to 
do an exhaustive key search, however, it looks like a pretty
attractive 
thing to use.

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On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 06:23:57PM +1200, Peter Gutmann
wrote:

> This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer
has been controlled not
> by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. 
The question remains,
> now that they have the world's most powerful
supercomputer system at their
> disposal, what are they going to do with it?  And I
wonder what the LINPACK 
> rating for Storm is?

Isn't most of the cost/complexity of super-computers the
interconnect
fabric and memory system, not the CPUs... Clearly for easy
to partition
problems this beats the "super-computer" systems,
but many large problems
won't tolerate Storm's interconnect latency...

The LINPACK benchmarks on super-computers largely measure
memory-bandwidth
not CPU power, but the memory pre-fetch pipeline depth is
not unbounded,
most algorithms will stall if latency is too high...
Simulations of
supernova explosions or aircraft wing dynamics probably
don't easily
scale on Storm...

-- 

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in error,
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* Peter Gutmann:

> This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but
the world's
> most powerful supercomputer entered operation recently.
 Comprising
> between 1 and 10 million CPUs (depending on whose
estimates you
> believe), the Storm botnet easily outperforms the
currently
> top-ranked system, BlueGene/L, with a mere 128K CPU
cores.

It's a bit unfair to compare those numbers with single-image
systems
or tightly-coupled clusters.  Grids are the more apt
comparison.

> This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer
has been
> controlled not by a government or megacorporation but
by criminals.

Doubt it.  If I recall the confirmed Phatbot numbers
correctly, they
where pretty substantial, too, especially for that time. 
And this was
the first time when I came across that "botnets are
grids plus
scalability and security" joke.

Some of the HTTP-based botnets advertised pretty high
infection
numbers, too, but such claims are difficult to verify.

On the other hand, LINPACK numbers for a botnet would likely
be much
lower than what is suggested by the raw CPU count.

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At 11:23 PM 8/30/2007, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer
has been controlled not
>by a government or megacorporation but by criminals. 
The question remains,
>now that they have the world's most powerful
supercomputer system at their
>disposal, what are they going to do with it?  And I
wonder what the LINPACK
>rating for Storm is?

There have been a number of half-years that SetiHome was
faster than
the top machines in the top500 list (counting by bogomips,
not real LINPAK),
and most of the times I've checked, it's been at least in
the top 10.

Some of the stats can be found at top500.org and
http://boinc.netsoft-online.com/e107_plugins/bo
inc/bp_summary.php
(though good SETIHome stats have been harder to get in
recent years,
partly for organizational or presentational reasons,
and partly because it's spun off a bunch of other
mass-computing programs.)




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