From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 95 15:11:04 PST
To: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Subject: Re: What ever happened to... Cray Comp/NSA co-development
In-Reply-To: <acfe321c01021004d5c5@[205.199.118.202]>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951221145251.3728B-100000@eskimo.com>
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tcmay@got.net wrote:

> Not in cracking "truly large" problems by brute force. Even if each of the
> million processors is capable of 100 MIPS (which is unlikely, given the PIM
> approach and the fine-granularity, few-bit-or-less word size, etc.), this
> is only 10^8 MIPS. For problems that (for instance) 10^75 machines would
> have to spend 10^10 years on, not even a drop in an ocean.

The problem is there are still people and organizations that use 512-bit 
RSA keys.  The DOE recentedly awarded Intel a contract to build a 
computer with 9072 Pentium Pro processors.  I doubt that it will be used 
for factoring keys, but if it were, it will be able to factor a 512-bit 
number in a matter of months.

The boundary delimiting "truly large" problems and merely extremely 
expensive ones inches up all the time.  Less than a decade ago people 
thought factoring RSA-129 was a "truly large" problem.

Wei Dai