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Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on Tue Jun 14, 2005 08:01 PM
from the beats-the-basement-beowulf-rack dept.
Supercomputing IBM Hardware
GORMUR writes "IBM has launched its Watson Blue Gene system, the largest privately owned supercompuer seen by the press. The super computer is described reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops. IBM has plans on giving Academic researchers access to some computing time. Some more info can be found the IBM site. All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption."
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  • REVENGE! (Score:5, Funny)

    by flawedgeek (833708) <karldnorman@NoSpaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:03PM (#12819552)
    Apple, you might wanna rethink that switch to Intel.....

    • Re:REVENGE! (Score:5, Funny)

      by ottothecow (600101) <ottothecow&gmail,com> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:16PM (#12819650) Homepage
      And you know that that offer to academic institutions is just a lure...

      "You see, this is the finest private super computer on IBM processors. You may have heard about the school that has a apple super computer, well, that was made when they used IBM processors. If you happen to be in the market for a supercomputer be aware that you can no longer trust Apple to make them the say way and are safer going directly with a system from IBM. Please enjoy your computing time, we sincerely hope that you did not accidentally underestimate the power of our supercomputer and lease too much time."

      All inquiries can be addressed by the sales division in room 341b.

      • No but I bet it would only take it a day or two to compile it!

        Ever wonder how much processing power Google has between all of their systems and all of the Google tool bars running around?

        Has anyone ever wondered if MS or Yahoo has tried or is currently using their various browser bars to provide distributed computing?

        Has anyone ever wondered if they buy insurance on these things for stuff like faulty processor design? Like the Pentium bug? I mean how'd you like to build this thing and the find out all of

  • NSA... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ThomasFlip (669988) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:08PM (#12819575)
    I think it's safe to say that the NSA, with it's largest budget out of any intelligence agency in the U.S, has probably cracked the 100 TF mark ? It's a shame we will never no what kind of muscle they can flex.

    • Re:NSA... (Score:5, Informative)

      by slavemowgli (585321) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:16PM (#12819646) Homepage
      What's really bad (or good, depending on one's point of view, I assume) about the NSA is not just the computing power they likely wield (they're the biggest consumer of electric power in the entire state of Maryland, so they probably do have some big iron there on site), but also the theoretical power in the form of mathematicians. The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned.

      Remember, for example, that the NSA invented public-key cryptography before Diffie and Hellman did; or remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.

      I dare say that this theoretical advantage is actually more important than the pure number crunching power they wield. There's virtually no limit on the computing power you can buy if you have enough money at your disposal (for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars), but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.

      • What you can't buy with money (Score:5, Interesting)

        by antispam_ben (591349) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:40PM (#12819815) Journal
        The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned. ... but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.

        Then what do they use to pay their mathematicians? Coffee?
        • I do want to point out that if you are a mathematician with the ability to seriously advance mathematics, it would totally suck to not be able to publish any of your major results. If a high stature mathematician is willing to work for NSA and risk not being able to publish work which he/she has done in his capcity as a NSA researcher, he/she most likely is in it for more than just money.

          I do wonder, suppose some NSA guy proves the Riemann's hypothesis. What would they do? How far does patriotism go?
    • ... that NSA would be interested in teraFLops? Last time I checked, their kind of processing required manipulating bits (in weird ways), not imprecise floating point numbers. Go to DOE to pay for FLOPS...

      Not that I'd know, but I can still guess... ;-)

      Paul B.

  • SHA Collisions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    People using 256-bit encryption algorithms should be safe for now, given the massive amount of computations needed for key exhaustion. However we should be working on implementing SHA-512 as soon as possible as it will soon become trivial to find collisions in SHA1

  • My data isn't really all that private (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lingur (881943) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:08PM (#12819579)
    If you have to defend yourself against some entity that owns the world's fastest supercomputer and doesn't want you to know it, I don't know what you'r e hiding and I don't want to know.

    Seriously, I'm not about to change all my passwords and strengthen my keys because whatever money I have in my bank account is just a drop in the ocean for those guys.

  • A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? (Score:5, Funny)

    by metachor (634304) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:09PM (#12819586)
    Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance?

    Google search of 'supercomputer whopping [google.com]'.

    • Origins of "whopping" term. (Score:5, Funny)

      by AtariAmarok (451306) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:16PM (#12819640)
      "Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance? "

      The use of this dates back to the "WOPR" strategic simulations supercomputer used by the Pentagon. Most know it from the documentary film "WarGames". It looked like a locomotive, but boy could it calculate. For several years, it was the standard by which supercomputers were measured. Eventually they came out with faster computers: once twice as fast as the WOPR ran at "two wops", one three times as fas "four wops". Eventually, an H got added in, and as computers left the old WOPR in the dust, the term "whopping" came to mean "Yeah, bud, it's really fast!"

      Want to play a game, Professor Falken?

    • Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Andy_R (114137) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:41PM (#12819821) Homepage Journal
      Well it does sound better than 'nearly as powerful as 41 playstation 3s'
    • Some more info can be found the IBM site.

      So, the big question is whether this supercomputer will have the whopping ability to check spelling and grammar.

  • Pish posh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok (451306) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:09PM (#12819591)
    Compared to the Milliard Gargantubrain in my garage, this thing is a mere abacus. Consider it not.

  • I have a supercomputer (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nicky G (859089) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:10PM (#12819593)
    In my pants.

  • So... (Score:4, Funny)

    by codexwriter (682385) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:10PM (#12819597) Homepage Journal
    I need 400 PS3's to make one of these.
    Who wants to help me start a fundraiser?

  • "Seen by the Press" (Score:5, Funny)

    by DyslexicLegume (875291) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:11PM (#12819605)
    Notice how the article says "seen by the press"...maybe there's an even more powerful one in the hands of some evil mastermind on an island in the Pacific who is plotting world domination by having it create a super weapon to destroy everything in its path...yet the computer always keeps giving the same answer:

    42
  • What's the largest non-privately owned supercomputer? And can I play Doom 3 on it?

  • sure. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by St. Arbirix (218306) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [dnesnwot.wehttam]> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:12PM (#12819612) Homepage Journal
    All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

    Yes, I, private citizen of a nation with a resident population of 296,365,988, am worried that the stuff I use private key encryption on will be under attack.

    Until I'm dating a girl with a billionaire ex-boyfriend/stalker I think I should be fine keeping things the way they are.

    Besides, I tend to make up my own encryption scheme for truly sensitive pictu^H^H^H^H^Hdocuments and then just delete the method.

    • Re:sure. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:49PM (#12819869)
      Encryption Schmichion

      We should be more concerned about someone with a Knoppix live-cd or something along those line. That thing has thus far given me unfettered access to more than 98% of the computer system into which I have booted it. For those that had no CD-rom you can just use an USB cd-rom. The only trouble you might encounter is if the BIOS is not set to boot off the CD-rom first and it has a password
      • I really don't see the use of a supercomputer in the establishment of botnets. Since when is the creation of a zombie node dependent on functional security? Botnets are built on security vulnerabilities. The supercomputer attack would only be useful on a legitimately high strength encryption system.

        So, yes, no one interested in encryption would be involved in setting up a botnet.

        And when I say I make up my own encryption I'm not saying it's all that exciting or wonderful, it's just not what anyone would e
          • Sadly, the easiest way to hide porn collections from the girls in my life is to drop them in folders called "programming" or "linux" or something else that they're in the habit of ignoring.

            After a while it's like the words don't even exist to them.

            Send secretive emails with topics like "fR33 \/a1ium" and when someone looks in your inbox their eyes will just glide past the words.

  • Dearest Slashdot Readers, (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:14PM (#12819628)
    It is largely unnecessary to increase the size of your keys, it stopped slowing us down quite a while ago. Don't even get us started on the usefulness of tin foil hats.

    Love,

    The Government

    P.S: Don't you people starting clearing the porn off your hard drives, this job gets pretty boring sometimes.
  • Out of curiousity, how much is the average supercomputer utilized? I mean, out of a 24 hour day, how much of that time does the supercomputer stay at >50% utilization? What is considered "full" utilization? Every CPU at >x% load? y of z CPUs at >x% load?
    • I would think (given the way many of them lease out time) that many supercomputers run at pretty high utilization most of the time.

      People prepare the simulations or calculations that need to be run and estimate a block of time needed. They then give that to the operators and request said block of time. The operators run the simulation as soon as that block is available.

    • Re:Anyone out there care to comment? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saratchandra (847748) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:24PM (#12819698) Homepage
      I've been using several supercomputers for my research project. Most of them are very busy. Eg. On the IBM P690(Cheetah) at Oakridge National labs,you have to wait for a week to get your 512 processor job scheduled. This is an extremely busy system. On the other hand,you have systems like the Itaniun cluster at NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) which schedules your jobs a lot quicker. Actually you can check out the usage of this cluster online at http://tg-monitor.ncsa.teragrid.org/ [teragrid.org] (don't slashdot it, it is quite useful to a lot of researchers :-) )
    • My guess is that most super computers are at 100% load. The reason being is that after you have spent millions on a new computer system that will be obsolete in two years, you want to get all the utilization out of it you can get in that time. Of course, this probably requires careful planning to queue simulations into the machine to reduce idle time.

      It's not like there is one screen with a researcher typing his code away at it. They probably test their code on lesser computers (a simple array of desktops)

  • I don't like SPAM (Score:5, Funny)

    by ankhcraft (811009) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:18PM (#12819662) Homepage

    All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

    Increase the size of my private ... and strengthen ... wait a sec! Ya' trying to sneak some SPAM past us?

  • As impressive as it is (Score:4, Funny)

    by hobotron (891379) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:22PM (#12819687)

    Im waiting for Sherlock Holmes Blue Gene system.
  • I have a complete, operational, DG MV30000 [simulogics.com]. And for private ownership by a civilian, that's pretty cool..

    (the link is to a sales brochure page)

  • Nice! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Duncan3 (10537) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @08:47PM (#12819859) Homepage
    Almost 1/2 a Folding@home, I'm 1/2 impressed ;)

    Holy interconnect batman!

  • My Computer Running Windows (Score:3, Funny)

    by kai.chan (795863) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:01PM (#12820319)
    Fastest privately owned supercomputer? That would be my computer running Windows. It has a record of Always-Flops.

  • I've been trying! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ScrewMaster (602015) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:33PM (#12820481)
    ... if it's time to increase the size of your private key ...

    I've been trying to increase the size of my private key, but those little blue "enhancement" pills didn't do anything for me.
    • So instead of taking 3 billion years for all the known supercomputers to factor my 2048-bit RSA key, it will only take 2.5 billion years.

      That is of course using a current computer, which will never go any faster (and presuming it actually has 100 percent uptime for 2.5 billion years - must be running Linux).

      At the current rate of computing power, and presuming for a moment that the "computer" this thing runs on increases in speed exponentially to match the rate of growth of computing speed, how long will

      • Re:DC? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mvdw (613057)
        Perhaps a decent measure would be to average the processing out over a week or so; eg each seti@home unit is, say, 1e9 floating point operations, calculate how many units are processed in a week, divide by seconds in a week, there's your number. This method allows for the redundancy of the @home method, ie, each unit will be computed a number of times, if only the completed units are counted it gives a measure of true (sustained) performance.

    • Re:Old Supercomputers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by joib (70841) on Wednesday June 15 2005, @01:38AM (#12821148)
      Well, the Cray T3E they used to have at the supercomputer center where I submit my stuff was dismantled and the pieces thrown into a big trash bin in the yard. *sniff*

      The life of a supercomputer is AFAIK really closer to 5 years than 10. It's not that they aren't impressive machines even 5 years old, it's just that they use _lots_ of power and floor space. Looking at how much computing per $ you can do, it's just cheaper to replace them with something new than to keep them running.

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