World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Peter Gutmann]

Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.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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