World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Peter Gutmann]

I feel I should add a followup to the earlier post, this was implied by the
rhetorical question about what the LINPACK performance of a botnet is, but
I'll make it explicit here:

The standard benchmark for supercomputers is the LINPACK linear-algebra
mathematical benchmark.  Now in practice the LINPACK performance of a botnet
is likely to be nowhere near that of a specially-designed supercomputer, since
it's more a distributed grid than a monolithic system.  On the other hand bot-
herders are unlikely to care much about the linear algebra performance of
their botnet since it doesn't represent the workload of any of the tasks that
such a system would be used for.

Where Storm leaves every conventional supercomputer in the dust is in terms of
the sheer hardware resources (number of CPUs, amount of memory, and network
bandwidth) at its disposal.

Peter.

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