For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer will be cracking codes at Bletchley Park. The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer. The Colossus machine will be pitted against modern computer technology that will also be used to decipher and read the transmitted messages. Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes. "A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does," he said.
View: Full Story @ BBC News
View: Full Story @ BBC News
Try using modern hardware (Conroe or wolfdale Xeons, for example) and modern code-cracking method, compare that to how fast the Colosuss runs, and see what happens.
What a useless waste of money this project is.
A later COTS supercomputer in the ASCI series (Thor's Hammer AKA Mjolnir), has actually given birth to a commercial supercomputer (Cray's XT3) just as the Cray-1 and later Cray-2 led to the later more commercially oriented Cray X-MP and Y-MP (the surprising thing about the Y-MP, which I've actually shared a room with, is that even with the communications nodes, it took up *less* space than it's closest competition among non-supercomputing mainframes, the IBM 30xx mainframes).
And yes, there is yet another *grid* supercomputing project (spun from the various protein-folding projects, such as F@H) applying the surplusage of computing cycles of Uncle Sam's scattered desktops/laptops/etc. to code-busting.
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