"Anitro" speculated about the fate and capabilities of the CCC PIM (processor-in-memory) machine. A friend of mine was working on it, and it would have been a screaming machine, no doubt about it. He said that the Cray mostly acted like a really fast network for the processor chips. As "Anitro" said, the PIM chips were made by a dedicated NSA company, Supercomputer Research Center, in Bowie MD. But, it was nowhere near finished when the company finally went down, and the team was completely disbanded. My friend was talking about going to the auction when the parts of the various machines were going to be sold, I don't know if he did so. He suspected that the various pieces would end up going back east to the Fort Meade area. Still, it is such an odd machine that you would probably have to transfer the staff to finish it, and that didn't happen. In any case, while it was fast (1/2 million 1-bit processors, perhaps as low as 1 nanosecond (1 GHz) cycle time), it was not fast enough to brute force reasonably strong ciphers. It's really no joke that it would take a computer with picosecond clocks the size of the earth more than the age of the universe to brute force IDEA, for instance. It would have made a great DES cracker, though; my back-of-the-envelope calculation has it cracking one key every .75 days on the average. thad -- Thaddeus Beier email: thad@hammerhead.com Technology Development vox: 408) 286-3376 Hammerhead Productions fax: 408) 292-2244