From: thad@hammerhead.com (Thaddeus J. Beier)
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 17:03:03 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: What ever happened to... Cray Comp/NSA co-development
Message-ID: <199512180038.QAA01725@hammerhead.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



"Anitro" speculated about the fate and capabilities of the
CCC PIM (processor-in-memory) machine.  A friend of mine was
working on it, and it would have been a screaming machine, no
doubt about it.  He said that the Cray mostly acted like a
really fast network for the processor chips.  As "Anitro"
said, the PIM chips were made by a dedicated NSA company,
Supercomputer Research Center, in Bowie MD.

But, it was nowhere near finished when the company finally went
down, and the team was completely disbanded.  My friend was talking
about going to the auction when the parts of the various machines
were going to be sold, I don't know if he did so.  He suspected that
the various pieces would end up going back east to the Fort
Meade area.  Still, it is such an odd machine that you would
probably have to transfer the staff to finish it, and that didn't
happen.

In any case, while it was fast (1/2 million 1-bit processors,
perhaps as low as 1 nanosecond (1 GHz) cycle time), it was not fast
enough to brute force reasonably strong ciphers.  It's really no joke
that it would take a computer with picosecond clocks the size of the earth
more than the age of the universe to brute force IDEA, for instance.
It would have made a great DES cracker, though; my back-of-the-envelope
calculation has it cracking one key every .75 days on the average.

thad
-- Thaddeus Beier                   email:  thad@hammerhead.com
   Technology Development             vox:  408) 286-3376
   Hammerhead Productions             fax:  408) 292-2244