27 Jan
1999
27 Jan
'99
3:09 a.m.
>To demonstrate that old
>hardware that can be picked up for pennies can be combined to attain
>amazing amounts of computing power.
Amazing? How many orders of magnitude difference in
horsepower
between a C-64 and a $600 Best Buy Intel box? Perhaps I'm being
unromantic, and I certainly have too many old computers of the
XT/AT/486 variety, but I just don't "get" many of these distributed
computing projects. (I do leave my spare contemporary computers
working for the RC5 project at distributed.net, but that's another
story.) Take 10 computers at 1 horse each, and they're still not
equal to one contemporary (cheap) computer at 10 horses. Sure,
there's hack value in doing it, but mostly for people with too
much time on their hands, or for people who aren't paying for the
electric bill or the room to put them in. Hack away, sure - but
claim they're doing "useful" work?
So, lets do RC5 un the C64 ?
Of corse, the C64 thing will only get some result on tasks that
are paralell from nature, and of course the result will be more
no 'personal' usable thing. An for shure an pentium box will out-
perform it easy, but as you said, there is a hack value, and see
it from a 1984 perspective, it _will_ be a huge power in that
seting. A cluster of 64 working nodes (plus some 20 communication
nodes) might produce a peek performance of 18 MIPS(6502) - that
can be near a 20 MHz 386 (or 486) - and a 20 MHz 386 was _way_
out of reach at that time.
In fact, I would love to see this thing cracking codes - just to
show that it might have been possible with of the shelf home
computer hardware to crack encodings that the (US) government
wanted us to belive to be safe - 40 Bit or less keys - they still
tell te story - and if such a home computer junk pile can be
a tread, than of course, well designed paralell systems have
been done at tis time ... Just an idea, since I'm realy mad
about 'official' crypto statements.
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK