What ever happened to... Cray Comp/NSA co-development

[Wei Dai]

tcmay at got.net wrote:

> Not in cracking "truly large" problems by brute force. Even if each of the
> million processors is capable of 100 MIPS (which is unlikely, given the PIM
> approach and the fine-granularity, few-bit-or-less word size, etc.), this
> is only 10^8 MIPS. For problems that (for instance) 10^75 machines would
> have to spend 10^10 years on, not even a drop in an ocean.

The problem is there are still people and organizations that use 512-bit 
RSA keys.  The DOE recentedly awarded Intel a contract to build a 
computer with 9072 Pentium Pro processors.  I doubt that it will be used 
for factoring keys, but if it were, it will be able to factor a 512-bit 
number in a matter of months.

The boundary delimiting "truly large" problems and merely extremely 
expensive ones inches up all the time.  Less than a decade ago people 
thought factoring RSA-129 was a "truly large" problem.

Wei Dai