Linux On Steroids: DIY supercomputer software from Sandia

[Faustine]

On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 05:06 PM, Faustine wrote:
Tim wrote:

>> Except when was the last time you heard of a Cypherpunks-interesting
>> cipher being broken with _any_ amount of computer crunching?
> Since when did people stop trying? The last time I heard a researcher 
> talk about trying to break a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher was last 
> Thursday.
> Hearsay and hot air? Probably; nothing that merits repeating. But it's
> hardly a dead issue.
>>And why not name who this researcher was, and why you think the cipher 
>>he was trying to break was Cypherpunks-interesting?

Because it's impolite to attribute other people's ideas and commentary to 
them in a public forum if they assumed they were speaking to you 
informally, in confidence. Hearsay and hot air.

I'm assuming you find Rijndael interesting.
http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/


(snip)
> We've all heard that line before, but I still don't think it's too far-
> fetched to assume that anyone who does work in this area might 
> appreciate 50 megs of free software to create his own supercomputer.
>>Fatuous nonsense, Beowulf clusters have been out for several years. The 
>>hard part is getting 50 Pentiums, not the software.

The idea has been around, but not the free software from Sandia.


>As for "50 gigaflops," big whoop. A readily-available dual G4 machine is 
>rated at about 8-10 gigaflops. (Or "FLOPS," as you wish.)
>>Still not interesting for cracking ciphers, in the real world.

Never said it was. 50? try 512.


> 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.

>>You need to get up to speed, so to speak.

232.6 billion operations a second still looks fairly impressive to me. 

~Faustine.