Distributed computing – teraflop/s statistics august 2007

What have I done…
…besides being busy again at work…

Meanwhile I’ve set up an almost automatic teraflop/s data-collector for distributed projects computing power.

The old dinosaur of distributed computing distributed.net has recently been available via Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in the yoyo@home project.
Yoyo@home wraps the real last distributed.net project the OGR-25 challenge to BOINC clients, since RSA has cancelled the pricemoney for the RC-72 challenge (has the RSA algorithm been fallen ?).
Worldcommunity-Grid, also counts into BOINC for some longer time, with their projects to find cure for: Aids, Malaria, Dengue, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimer, Parkinson, …

And finally a not yet integrated into BOINC project, but even bigger in calculation power: Folding@home (FAH)
FAH has once almost reached 1 petaflop/s as the first non-commercial distributed project in may this year, when GPU’s and the PS3 were added as folding clients.
But then came the hot/wet summer, earthquakes and power-outages, …
At least the summer is almost over, and as you can see in the graph FAH is getting faster again, ready to break the petaflop mark.

Using Mac OS X grapher tool, it produces some nice graphics like this one:
?
On the other side, this years supercomputing conference predicted the first commercial installation to reach more than 1 petaflop in october this year.

So, fire up your engines… let the race begin…
😉 Kobaan.

NBC reporter almost tarred and feathered at DEFCON

It appears that there are always some people which need to learn it the hard way.

This was the case for NBC dateline reporter Michelle Madigan trying to undercover filming the DEFCON 15 conference in Las Vegas without permission, and without a press badge. When she was told (by staff/also undercover hackers) that she would need a press badge and is not allowed to enter certain areas for “hidden” filming she just ignored the warning, thus getting more attention than she could have wanted. Suddenly a conference speaker introduced the game “Find the undercover reporter”, which lead to big bawl and an escort to her car, with lots of embarrassing comments.
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Meanwhile her MySpace account is removed as it was flooded with angry comments.

See Michelle, such stupid things can ruin your cyber social life.