[Beowulf] $1, 279-per-hour, 30, 000-core cluster built on Amazon EC2 cloud

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Tue, 4 Oct 2011 at 4:39pm, Robert G. Brown wrote

> On Tue, 4 Oct 2011, Chi Chan wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Rayson Ho <raysonlogin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> BTW, I've heard horror stories related to routing errors with this
>>> method - truck drivers delivering wrong tapes or losing tapes
>>> (hopefully the data is properly encrypted).
>>
>> I just read this on Slashdot today, it is "very hard to encrypt a
>> backup tape" (really?):
>>
>> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/04/1815256/saic-loses-data-of-49-million-patients
>
> Not if it is encrypted with a stream cipher -- a stream cipher basically
> xors the data with a bitstream generated from a suitable key in a
> cryptographic-strength pseudorandom number generator (although there are
> variations on this theme).  As a result, it can be quite fast -- as fast
> as generating pseudorandom numbers from the generator -- and it produces
> a file that is exactly the size of the original message in length.

For added "no, it's not hard, they're apparently just not very bright" 
value, LTO4+ includes hardware AES encryption.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF