World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[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.  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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