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The New (Unofficial) #1 Supercomputer

And it's in the hands of Dr Evil, good people!


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Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:23:57 +1200
From: Peter Gutmann
To: cryptography_at_metzdowd.com
Subject: World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

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 for which the typical machine has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1 GB RAM, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of 1 - 10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1 - 10 PB RAM. BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 TB.

This system has better hardware resources than what's listed at http://top500.org for the 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
Storm: 1-10M CPUs, 1-10PB

This may be the first time 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?

Microsoft Windows, Storm Worm, 'we care', and 'we know security' are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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