[FDE] Fwd: World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Ali, Saqib]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Date: Aug 30, 2007 11:23 PM
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,
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.