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. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
