Linux On Steroids: DIY supercomputer software from Sandia

[Jim Windle]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001 00:05:30    Faustine wrote:
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>The idea has been around, but not the free software from Sandia.
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The idea has been around and so has software and not just from Sandia.  The Scyld cluster software costs $2 for non-commercial use and is widely used.  The technology is advancing very quickly, for instance Avalon at LANL came in 113 on the Top500 in 11/98 at 48 gigaflops.  Systems with say 64 Athlon processors and doing roughly 75-80 gigaflops are available pre-built or can be and are constructed by a wide variety of universities and corporations (check out the Beowulf list to get an idea of the range of applications and the number of large clusters out there).  There are many application of cypherpunk-interest for this sort of cheap computing power.  Unfortunately crypto probably isn't one of them.  It is far easier to increase the size of the key than to scale up the processing power in a meaningful way.  Until far more efficient factoring algorithms are found the math will insure this remains the case.

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>Never said it was. 50? try 512.
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>> You never know what might come from putting that kind of computational
>> power in the hands of people here. Create, break, do whatever you want.
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The technology is potentially revolutionary in many areas of interest to cypherpunks but factoring large numbers is so hard and it is so easy to increase the size of keys that crypto will easily stay ahead of the Beowulf technology.  Now if someone had a working quantum computer that might be a different story.

Jim Windle


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