I recently stumbled upon a nice note one of the security mailinglists I'm reading. Botnets, huge networks of computers infected with trojan horses/worms can be used for DDoS attacks and spam sending. These uses are known and a big threat already. But the nodes do not only have an internet connection, but also a CPU and RAM (not to speak of harddisks) which could be put into good use by the "owners". Kinda cute (and dangerous) idea, I think :)

Peter Gutmann (Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland) makes a quick calculation using some statistics from the Valve Steam service and the known or estimated size of the biggest botnet and comes to the conclusion that this network could easily beat the Top500 computers. 

  -------- Original Message --------
  Subject: [Full-disclosure] World's most powerful supercomputer goes online (fwd)
  Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:30:42 -0400 (EDT)
  From: Jay Sulzberger <
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  ---------- Forwarded message ----------

  Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:23:57 +1200

  From: Peter Gutmann <
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  Subject: World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

  This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but the world's most

  powerful supercomputer entered operation recently.  Comprising between 1 and

  10 million CPUs (depending on whose estimates you believe), the Storm botnet

  easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system, BlueGene/L, with a mere

  128K CPU cores.  Using the figures from Valve's online survey,

  http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the typical machine

  has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM, the Storm cluster

  has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of

  RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes).  In fact this composite system has

  better hardware resources than what's listed at http://www.top500.org for the

  entire world's top 10 supercomputers:

    BlueGene/L: 128K CPUs, 32TB

    Jaguar: 22K CPUs, 46TB

    Red Storm: 26K CPUs, 40TB

    BGW: 40K CPUs, 10TB

    New York Blue: 37K CPUs, 18TB

    ASC Purple: 12K CPUs, 49TB

    eServer Blue Gene: ?

    Abe: 10K CPUs, 10TB

    MareNostrum: 10K CPUs, 20GB

    HLRB-II: 10K CPUs, 39GB

  This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not

  by a government or megacorporation but by criminals.  The question remains,

  now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer system at their

  disposal, what are they going to do with it?  And I wonder what the LINPACK

  rating for Storm is?

  Peter.

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