I also find the merriment at Nobuki Nakatuji poor English skills offensive - I wish I spoke Japanese as well as he can write English. That's not to say I think we should all go off and work on MISTY right away. However, on his 'NEC supercomputer', there's a somewhat low-content press release at http://www.nec.co.jp/english/today/newsrel/9801/2101.html They've been asked to design as 32 TFlop machine, with an aim of building it by 2002. It's a highly parallelized vector machine, ostensibly aimed at weather forcasting. It'll have 4 TB of RAM, and 'thousands' of processors. I wish I knew just what processor it's supposed to use, but it's probably only on paper at the moment. Here's a really rough calculation Assume integer instructions are no slower than the FP instructions. Best DES code for Alpha gets 94 clock cycles/key - guess 200 instructions/key. 2^56 *200 = 1.4e19 instructions = 450360 seconds = 125 hours to exhaust key space, or about 2.5/days on average. even if I'm off by a factor of two, this is pretty quick for a general purpose machine.