Re: World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

Florian Weimer <fwdeneb.enyo.de> writes:
>* 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.

Sure, absolutely, that's why I made the LINPACK comment at
the end.  However
for the sorts of usages that malware authors might put it to
(e.g. A5 rainbow
tables, as Daniel Schroeder suggested) it's probably going
to be hard to beat.
The message was intended to draw attention to the
frightening amount of raw
computing power that's now in the hands of people whose
identities and motives
we're not even certain of.

Peter.

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