[Beowulf] [tt] World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Peter St. John]

I'm imaging this system as a computer, and the headaches of it's operator
(the guy who scripted the worm, maybe) whose million nodes are infested by a
million hostile users (the refeverse of a users desktop infested by a worm,
is a worm's virutual supercomputer infested by users). Some of them are
running virus removal tools, but the rest are shutting down their systems in
frustration because they are getting 0% CPU usage for their games and web
browsing. So this pirate-Operator is getting excremely low productivity from
his Supercomputer. Also there is the technical problem of one node accessing
RAM in that petabyte range, from some other desktop with some other OS in
some other state, who's owner is unplugging it in anger.

So besides preferring to call it a "Virtual Special-purpose (mail-bombing)
Supercomputer" instead of a "(General purpose) Supercomputer" I'd also be
skeptical of all performance metrics. If you can't measure the number of
nodes within an order of magnitude then other metrics are perforce dubious.

And I'm pretty sure that Deep Blue could beat it at chess, if someone
managed to MPI a chess program on Storm Bot. But I"m sure I can't prove it.

Peter



On 8/31/07, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
> > 10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you believe), the Storm
> botnet
> > easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system, BlueGene/L, with a
> mere
>
> cool.  why is my immediate question: what grid middleware do they use,
> and what can it do for us?  ;)
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