World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Florian Weimer]

* 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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