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Encryption Security

Russian E2K cracking RC5 161

Posted by Hemos from the maybe-now-we-can-crack-it-before-i-die dept.
Tuna Phish writes "Apparently the new Russian E2K computer is being used to crack distributed.net's RC5 contest! The user has come out on top the past few days with 2.7GK/s, more than 6 times the keyrate of second place. His message states "Russian Elbrus E2K is REAL POWER!" " Great-now we just need to get them to join Team Slashdot, and he can get all the pr0n he needs. *grin* So, I've been doing some looking around, and am doubting the veracity of this: bogus client? First prototype? Anyone have more info? Post it in the comments.
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Russian E2K cracking RC5 More

Russian E2K cracking RC5

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  • It's a fraud (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What they did was to crack the RC5 protocol and they are automatically generating bogus blocks that have been checked. It looks like it might queer the whole contest.

  • Transmeta; pIII (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that russian article is very very interesting. here are some interesting facts:

    1. I translated a paragraph related to Transmeta (firm for which Linus Torvalds work):

    During the period of 1992 till 1995 Elbrus was working together with a Sun microprocessor architector Dave Ditsel. As Babayan said "After that Dave started his own firm - Transmeta and started working on a computer very similar to ours. We still have close contacts with Dave. And he still wants to work with us." Very little is known about the Transmeta product. The only thing that is own is that it is going to be VLIW/EPIC
    microprocessor with low energy consumption, binary compatibility with x86 is achieved using dynamic object code translation.


    2. One of the lead PIII developers was one of the russian elbrus developers:

    http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q21999 /articles/art_2who.htm#pentkovski

  • Bye Bye Distributed.NET, Hello Seti@home (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jez... I've got a better chance of finding E.T. than hitting the winning code.

  • Re:Russian vacuum tube technology (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First, there're no VT-based computers produced in Russia, believe me, 'been there, seen it'.

    It is true that Russian silicon technologies used to fall behind western ones for some period of time. But not so badly as to produce VT-based computer equipment. They've been able to make (illegal) clones of IBM/360, PDP/11, VAX/11, x86 (386 was the last AFAIK) without much delay from initial release dates, the use of so called ES line of computers (IBM/3x0 clones) in 1970/80-s put an end to the much promising BESM line. The power of the BESM and its derivative AS/6 (high-performance BESM cluster) was clearly shown during th Soyuz-Apollo event when it gave the exact coordinates of the meeting point of two ships way before the American Cray. This (the march of ES series) is now considered by some Russian experts a clever move by Western intelligence agencies to shut down Russia's own technologies. BTW, IBM representatives never protested these clones, they even had a deal recently for those institutions that still had them to change two ES machines by one S/390 with full transfer of running software. No surprise here - these machines had fair amounts of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum) in them.

    Elbrus was one of the homemade Russian (and not only Russian but also Armenian and others, now they're all different countries) technologies that was not buried by the ES's, mostly because they were under the militaries' wing. The folks there are trues experts in WLIV aka EPIC design - AFAIK Elbrus used it from the start. And sure, Elbrus 1 and 2 were not built using VTs, last ones are definitely VLSI. They're extremely good performance wise, but ther're not intended for mass markets due to high production costs (read: only those who really need can afford this, e.g. weather prognosis centers and nuclear simulators)

    As for the tubes - well, Russian scientists never put an end to this technology, it is mostly used in analog devices that deal either with high power or with high precision (amplifiers, etc.) There were efforts on th low-end to make sub-millimeter sized VTs for embedding, dunno about mass production of those beasts.

    The financial problems of E2k were solved by the major of Moscow Yury Luzhkov this spring: "At the end of two-hour visit Yury Luzhkov gave concrete orders on intensifying the works and providing all needed conditions to complete the works" (very free translation from this link [el2000.ru])

    I don't think that this RC5 result is a working E2k though, it's most possibly the large number of computers using one e-mail. Maybe they worked for half a year and submitted all they did in one day :) And least likely it's some ten Elbrus 2's running emulated x86 clients.
  • Just a minor point : USSR clones of American devices were not illegal. The USSR was a sovereign nation, and those strange American IP laws did not apply there.
  • Patriots don't work very well. There was lots of hype about them in the Gulf War, but they were still only shooting down a few SCUDs. They are also fairly short-range, and need quite a bit of prepping. They are no defence against nukes at all.
  • You might want to repost that with the pointy brackets replaced with the appropriate HTML entities...
  • Hey, i've driven Sahin and Kartal :-), they're also not state-of-the-art (design by fiat in the 70s). but they're still ok, although i prefer BMW.
  • but then again, you have to admitt that transmeta is in a place where investors are looking for projects while E2K (if it's for real, I don't know) is on the other side of the earth however you look at it.
    On a general note, having met a number of rusian scientists I dare to say that rusian science deserves A LOT of respect. They have great tradition in science and education. Don't put them down because the political system during the post war era has destroyed the country. There is nothing wrong with the people.

    Cheers,
    /jarek
  • I would be very much inclined to think this is a fraud and here is why. First of all, I believe that the E2k used its own intruction set, there is not E2k client.

    Secondly when we last heard they hadn't even put the chip in silicon yet. I'm sorry, but even for large companies it takes several months to go from the final design to silicon.

    It just doesn't seem feasible. Here is another thing, lets do some math. Slashdot did 1.55 billion keys yesterday. That is done with 912 people. Assuming only 1500 computers doing RC5 on slashdot that would be about 1000kkeys a second for each computer (seems high, my k6 only gets 330 or something). That would put this thing approximately 2700 times faster than the current cpus. I'm sorry, thats not true.

  • There doesn't appear to be cause for alarm (Score:4)

    by Nugget94M ( 3631 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @08:40AM (#1797249) Homepage
    From looking at the actual work being performed, there is no reason to believe that this person is using a hacked client. We've been in contact with the user and although the details are sketchy his story seems legitimate.

    We're still talking with him, but for now the assumption is that this activity is legitimate. Our biggest fear is not that he's compromised the project but that he's using resources he doesn't have permission to use.

    For what it's worth, he's not claiming that the blocks are being completed by an E2K. The motto is just his way of showing enthusiasm for the platform. In reality, it's win32 (and a few sparcs) all going through a linux proxy.

    It's still way too early to draw any conclusions, but so far there's been nothing to set off any alarms on our end.
  • No, the Pentium II/IIIs are RISC based at their core with a CICS interpreter above them for the system to interact with.
  • ÂÀÑÊ ...
    Êîãäà âû ýàáàòèòå äîâîëüíî
    âîðîâàòü íàñòîÿùèé ëó÷øèé

    I hope I spelled that correctly.
  • Here's more info on the E2k:

    http://www.el2000.ru/press-releases/25031999-01.ht ml [el2000.ru]

    At least it won't be those AnandTech weenies who overtake us first! :P
  • Occasionally send out a key which is known, but unknown to the client. See if the client reports it as positive.
  • What makes the E2k just soooooooooo much better then any other western design..

    The fact that it's being used to crack RC5.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Distributed.net don't have one for download...

    I guess they had to hack together their own ;-)
  • My understanding is that there are people who swear *by* (not at) their Lada Samara's.

    Because it's one of the few cars out there that can be repaired in the field, with simple hand tools. No fancy electronic stuff, not sophisticated feedback systems, no obscure bits and pieces.

    Which, when you're in the middle of the Australian desert, can make the difference between living and dying. A bit of duct tape, a wrench and a whack with a hammer, and you're off and running again.

    Wouldn't want one, myself. Got garages and taxis and stuff 'round here. :-)
  • distributed.net don't have a separate intel/amd/cyrix client too... they have OS clients

    (granted, the OS clients do choose different cores for different CPUs.... hmmm.....)
  • > You really think that their first move would be to waste processor time on a silly game.

    Yes, that's quite likely. Consider, for example, how many people own machines with horsepower and RAM leaking out of the seams, and dual interleaved 3D video cards just to play Quake and such like.

    BTW, he doesn't say "I am running an Elbrus/Elbrii," just "Elbrus is really cool." And I agree.

    They get their speed by ignoring the derived-from-4004-25-years-ago Intel architecture to build the basic CPU core, then building a good on-the-fly Intel-to-reality translator for it. Which is essentially what everything since the PentiumPro has done.

    AMD seem to finally be getting a process like this right with the K7, shpiing in weeks, whereas Intel might get around to shipping Merced before RC5-64 finishes. Perhaps instead of just selling out, Cyrix should have started making Elbrus?
  • >>Isn't it amazing that Trasmeta, without any
    >>thing, has most people here believers. While
    >>E2K, on the same boat, with evidence, has most
    >>people here yell fraud?
    Yeah, but here's the difference. Transmeta has been basically silent about their project(s)--what you hear about them is speculation from outsiders, whereas Elbrus is it's own PR machine. And, at the risk of sounding cynical, they do have a vested interest in everybody beliving their claims, true or not.
    Elbrus is the one making the outrageous claims here, let them prove that what they say is true. And in the absence of such proof, why should I believe them?
    Third-party benchmarks anyone?
  • Eff's machine that was used for previous competitions? Is it too expensive to pay the power bill for or something?

    Or is this something completely different?

  • A lot of the myths about Russian vacuum tubes came from the reports about the MIG-25 that was flown by defector Victor B****** in 1976 to Japan.

    The main radar of the MIG-25 used vacum tubes because it was extremely powerful. Tubes excel when power is required. First, it's cheap to build a powerful tube and expensive to build a powerful transistor. Second, when tubes fail, they go *plink* and when transistors fail, they explode and could bring down the aircraft. Try connecting a cheap diode in forward bias to a 12 volt power supply. It'll explode like a firecracker. My uncle used to work at a TV transmitter run by CBS. He showed me the driver for the final RF stage to the broadcast antenna. It was a gigantic vacuum tube.

    MIG-25's are interceptors and they need to locate their targets over the vast distances of the Russian north. They don't usually have AWACS support, and their targets don't usually have transponders (!). So, the MIG-25 radar is far larger than what you'll find in an F-15. A vacuum tube is the perfect choice for such an application.

  • a notice doesn't even need to be given out - because the client doesn't return jack squat to the user about the key that was just completed. that would be a load on the keyservers that might not work well though... good idea though
  • some one needs to read on hardware. I think that the pipelines that they are reffering to are what makes the Athlon (K7) do way faster floating point operations, i dunno, im not a hardware man so what am i doning dissing you? well basically floating point pimpe lines just speed up floating point operatios which is good for games and stuff.
  • How interesting. If this is true, this so-called "E2K" is just a network of masq'ed computers. Quite believable in theory, though I wonder where the computers all came from...

    Power of Linux, eh? 8)



    -W-
  • Patriot is a joke.
  • No no no, Dave Taylor, founder of crack.com.
    HE used to word at id software. He's the one that did all the ports of id games to linux (until he quit and Zoid took over)
  • Wow, you've got it. That's right, anything that happens that isn't easily explainable MUST be the work of (your favorite TLA here)...

    Tom Byrum
  • you can safely say that a computer running at 2,500,000,000 Hz is not going to be generating 6,700,000,000 keys per second.


    Why not?

    What's parallel processing? What are pipelines?

    Alejo.
  • Well, pipelines are what allows processors to execute multiple instructions at the same time. The idea is that you can be executing say 5 different instructions at the same time. It takes you 5 clock cycles to execute a given instruction, but since you are executing 5 at the same time, it works as if you were able to execute one machine instruction in each cycle. Most modern processors have multiple pipelines, meaning they can be executing around 10 different instructions at the same time. Each instruction is broken into different stages and each of your pipelines goes executing the stages one after the other (stages are like: load instruction, decode instruction, load registers/memory, do math, store registers/memory).

    Alejo.
  • The thing about hacking up a fake client is that it can report "key not found in block X" really rapidly by not actually doing the search. This is an excellent heuristic which is correct in very close to 100% of all cases, with the minor drawback that it completely misses the point. If someone measures the size of a "not found" report message, we can use that to perform a meaningful calculation on their computer system: not the number of keys per second, but the throughput of the proxy server as measured from their client. Still, the hacked client thing is a bit of a problem. How do you tell whether the client at the other end of a net connection is legit? Too hard for me, Jimmy.
  • From one of their recent press-release Q&A's:
    http://www.el2000.ru/press/press_faq-2502.html

    Q: Have you already worked with OSs supporting multiprocessing?
    A: We have compiled Kernel OS Linux 2.0.34 using Elbrus compiler and executed on the machine simulator.

    And yes, I know, Elebrus runs x86 so we could figure that out ourselves, but it's nice to hear it from them!
  • What makes the E2k just soooooooooo much better then any other western design..

  • It's more a question of known quantities. People like Linus Torvalds? Dave Taylor? They've done amazing things in the past; most people are inclined to believe they may deliver amazing things in the future.
  • Wasnt it just about 3 or 4 months ago that the folks at Elbrus were asking for financing? What exactly happened between now and then? I recall reading in early April that they were still running simulations on the chip and that there was no silicon available.

    Anyone here who has more information than whats on their website?

    Shri

  • Besides... the address is from chat.ru and I'd doubt anyone at elbrus.ru would list their showcase CPU on such a forum using an address from chat.ru.
  • How do we know this?
  • distributed.net don't have a separate intel/amd/cyrix client too... they have OS clients


    AMD and Cyrix are both x86 clones, so they run the same kinds of instructions as the intel procs. there ARE multiple clients for Linux on distributed.net, for procs that are not x86-compatible .. check out the rc5-client download page at [distributed.net]
    http://www.distributed.net/cgi/select.cgi

    they've got clients for linux-alpha, linux-ppc, linux-sparc, etc. etc. etc.

    But still it looks highly unlikely to me that this chip can run at these speeds, unless they've built a couple of multi-processor machines

    --
  • transmeta may just have sneakier pr team ,-))
  • Dumbass.

    First, there is no "union" ... its called Russia, and it's an independent country, no longer even under a communist government (sadly).

    Second, do you REALLY think sending a rocket into space with skilled astronauts and equipment to fix an orbiting space station is at all equivalent in cost to having some engineers hack away on chip designs and schematics?

    Third, yes, you are right, screw RC5 =) Seti@Home forever.

    I too am skeptical of the reports. Here is a twist on the subject that might have been posted, but it's how I see the subject. The stats board shows that yesterday, the "E2K" user completed 863,483 blocks... there are 86,400 seconds in one full day. Roughly 10 blocks every second. Think about that for a while.

    If indeed it is just a collection of computers, it would have to require thousands (as illustrated in other posts). Knowing that, how have all the members coordinated so timely and so secretly? (And think of the costs to own and power all the computers involved.) Congrats to them if that's what they are pulling off.
  • Here are translations of some of the things mentioned about E2K (i put [sic] wherever i did not know what the hell they were talking about):

    -- the processor should triple or quintiple the performance, cut down the electrical consumption, and be cheaper than the Intel Merced.

    -- the Elbrus team has a good enough reputation and experience to make that happen [sic]

    -- Elbrus series computers were produced in Russia well before their architectural analogs even made their way into western development labs.

    -- the Elbrus 3 was made in 1991 using old crystall [sic: not silicon?] technology but still outperformed the Cray 2-to-1.

    -- the E2K will use even better technology than that of the today's record holder Alpha 21264.

    -- the E2K EPIC technology with its low consumption of electricity will provide in the next 2-3 years a "supercomputer in a pocket calculator"

    -- the compiler for the E2K is as innovative as the hardware used. The de-parallelizing [sic] compiler at its current state allows upto 10 operations per cycle which is more than 3 times higher than the Alpha.

    -- the E2K is able to run Intel and Sun processor code only 10-30% slower than its own (in comparison to the FX!32 patch for execution of Intel code on the Alpha slows the computer down threefold). With this the E2K allows for a 100% dual compatibility [sic] of any Intel codes under any operating system, which is another improvement over FX!32.

    -- another important innovation is the "bulletproof" defense of active code and data against viruses. Development of similar technology in the West stopped with the downfall of Intel 432 processor.

    The logical development of the Elbrus has been completed and the team is now ready for the final phase -- making the crystal. [silicon or something else?]

    According to B.A Babaian, "The first superscalar machine was Elbrus 1 in 1978, whose analog in the West appeared only in 1992. In fact, that design is analogous to the Pentium Pro which appeared in 1995."

    According to Kit Difendorf, a Motorola developer, "in 1978, in Elbrus 1 the processor worked with execution of 2 operations per cycle, changing of operation order, renaming of registers, and execution of request" [sic].

    Again according to Babaian, a number of western companies have been talking to Elbrus, including Sun and HP, but only Sun was able to become a partner. The Elbrus team has worked with Sun towards improvements in the UltraSparc processor, compilers, operating systems (including Solaris), Java, and multimedia libraries. [Amazing, huh?]

    However, the partnership with Sun was discontinued because all of the intellectual property would move over to them even though 90% of the technology was done before Sun even appeared. Right now, around 70 US patents protect Elbrus's intellectual property.

    ...

    All system programming for the E-1 (1978) and E-2 (1984) was done in hig-level language El-76 instead of assembly. El-76 has a lot of features of Algol-68, but the principal difference is in dynamic connection of types on hardware level. All programming on Elbrus is in El-76, there is no assembly for the Elbrus. El-76 is translated into bytecode, reminding of Java, which is interpreted by the hardware into simple machine commands "on-the-fly."

    A lot of the rest (which i am skipping) is about E-90 which looks almost exactly like the Pentium Pro spec sheet. And the next bit about E2K includes comparisons of it with Intel Merced.

    E2K Merced
    Frequency, GHz: 1.2 0.8
    Performance, Specint95/Specfp95: 135/350 45/70
    Size in mm^2: 126 300
    Electric consumption, Watts: 35 60
    System bus throughoutput, Gb/sec: 15 n/a
    Cache, Kb: 64/256 n/a
    Peak performance, GFLOPS: 10.2 n/a
  • I certainly hope this thing is real, the RC5 project [distributed.net] needs as much CPU power as it can get. A lot of people switched their computers over to the SETI project and I think it's impacting RC5 a lot, which is a shame. At yesterday's block rate [distributed.net] the last RC5 block will be cracked on January 4, 2007! But of course, the secret key could be found at any time....
  • You can tell the rc5 speed of a totally unknown CPU from it's Mhz rating? Oh please.
  • Well, Elbrus has a history of creating processors that are for ahead of those by Intel, AMD, Cyrix, National Semi, etc. Much of the Pentiums most advanced features were first present in Elbrus processors. Some Elbrus employees then left to join intel (this according to an old register article). Oh, and by the way, Russia is a westernized nation.

    adam
  • I'm all for faster CPUs, but this is ridiculous.

    For them to say that the E2K will be 3-5 times faster than the Merced is silly, considering:

    The Merced is not out yet

    There are no benchmarks for the Merced yet

    The E2K has only been SIMULATED with Verilog

    I don't care just how explicitly parallel the E2K is, you are not going to get that kind of performance gain.

    For those who are curious, a bit about how explicit parallellism works:
    Every intel cpu since the 386 has had a 32 bit instruction word. A portion of this is the actual instruction, and the rest is the data that it operates on (which register, memory address, etc.)
    With Merced's EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) ISA, the instruction word is _128_ bits wide. In this the 128 bits are actually *3* instructions plus a template that contains extra information. This is how it is explicitly parallel.
    You may have heard how EPIC requires a lot of code analysis during compilation. This is so that the compiler can find portions of code that do not depend on other parts. These are separated and executed in parallel by the Merced.

    There are a lot of other features that I won't bother explaining (predication, speculation, etc.). Just be assured that the EPIC architecture is VERY fast. For the Elbrus guys to claim this kind of performance gain over a cpu that is still not out (using benchmarks from a SIMULATOR, mind you), is ludicrous.

    Then there's the issue of the insanely high keyrate.

    Take one look at those numbers again. 2.7 GIGA keys/second? The fastest cpus today still operate in the area of millions of keys per second. I'm curious how an unknown company using unknown technology on an unknown cpu could get a keyrate an order of magnitude larger than anything else. That alone should make anyone a little skeptical.

  • Can anybody make anything of this? "Ðåáÿòà, à ÷î ýòî âû òóò äåëàåòå? - Êèíî-òî óæå çàêîí÷èëîñü..." My guess is that it would look more like human writing if I switched to the cyrillic font. Go here [distributed.net] for the original.
  • That's what the 'explicit parallel' architecture they're referring to is all about: completing several operations at the same time or during the same clock cycle. That was all that older computers and OS's could do (Original DOS for instance). Back then, a megahertz rating on a computer meant everything simply because of the fact that the computers were explicitly serial (only able to do one operation at a time).

    Your confusing *application* parallelism, with CPU parallelism. CPU parallelism is what allows a CPU to execute more than one instruction per clock, but as far as the programmer, the OS, and everyone else is concerned, it's still a serial machine. Consider this x86 example

    add bx, ax
    add cx, ax
    inc dx


    On a 286, or something each one of those instructions would go sequentially, some of them taking more then one CPU Cycle. But, if you look at the code, you see that none of those operations require results from any of the others. So it would be possible to do them "out of order" or even at the same time. The CPU is still a serial device, but CPU parallelism is just a way to cram more code in there faster.

    On the other hand, *application* parallelism has nothing to do with the CPU your using. You can linux on a 386 just fine. What happens there is, the Operating system "time slices" every once in a while, and changes to another application. The CPU only executes code from one app at a time, weather or not the CPU has any parallelism. The big advantage for application parallelism is that you can run *more than one* CPU at a time, and have them operate on more then one stream at a time.

    SMID implementations like Intel's SSE and MMX and AMDs 3dnow instructions are a further step in CPU parallelism, but they don't really let you run more then one thread at a time


    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • American Missiles (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @06:53AM (#1797287) Journal
    "much of the US defense would be decimated by EMPs from the first attack wave"

    • The U.S. has no defense against missiles.
    • U.S. misiles are designed to withstand EMP because they'll be exposed to it from the first explosions in a group ("fratricide")
    • Missile silos are protected against EMP at various levels.
    • EMP can destroy tube based devices also. You've never run too much power through a tube, have you?.
  • deep crack was designed to crack des encryption not rc5
  • From the press release:
    The E2K project represents the latest commercial endeavor of the former Soviet Union's most talented computer scientists, many of whom have designed and delivered three generations of supercomputers, including those running the Russian Space Mission Control and the Russian Missile Defense System.

    Ummm... so these are the same 'computer scientists' that have us worried about Y2K problems with their missile defense system? Yet they can design a killer chip like the E2K?
  • I would think that d.net would have already noticed this user's impressive performance and taken appropriate measures to verify its validity.
    Perhaps it would be wiser to wait a few days before issuing wild speculations about rc5 client-fraud...

    Of course, I bet we could *ask* the d.net stat admins for their opinion... ;)

  • Haha... I agree with that completely--paranoia...
    and I'm wide open to the possibility that such a chip could exist--what with the stubborn domination of Intel's x86 in the US PC market.

    But for the doubtful, my o/c'd celeron can do ~1250kkey/s, and at ~$50 a pop for the cpu, it's not terribly expensive. In a "worst-case" scenario (no E2K), such a key rate could still be attained by "normal" computers at the company. (Though, I do not know how large Elbrus is.)

    According to its web site, Elbrus has a few powerful US partners...interesting.
  • From http://www.ixbt-labs.com/cpu/elbrus-e2k.shtml

    "As for compilers, the Elbrus team proved highly qualified here as well as in architectures developing and electronic design: at present the E2K parallelizing compiler achieves up to 10 instructions per clock cycle, which is almost three times as much as the best existing Alpha compiler manages"
  • There's a super duper huge error on the page with
    the press release...

    They state that current Pentium processors are based on a RISC architecture?!?!?

    Isn't that more like CISC?
  • I've got 6 computers here - all Intel, all overclocked. My keyrate is generally around 9.5-10million keys per second. Two of these boes are dual SMP Celerons - one running 2X464, the other 2X450 or so (Damn 366s!). My lowliest Celeron - a 266 Celeron runs 448mhz and cranks over 1million keys itself. Despite lacking a cache it flies on RC5 and DES. The dual boxes crank out over 2million keys per second each BTW.

    Now - do I believe that this is a real team and number? Well - I'm very skeptical. 2Giga keys - ponder that a moment and compare it to what I'm running. 10 machines here crank say 10million keys - this guy is MANY times that. What does this company do? How many people does it have? How many workstations? Do all of these keys come through one Proxy? I figure he'd have to be running something like 2000 machines in the 450+mhz range to be getting this (unless my math is off and it's more). Mind you, my machines keyrate drops like a rock when I run something intensive so he must have more than what I calculated or be rolling in cash to let that many machines be dedicated to this task. Nugget said that this was a couple of SPARCs and the rest WIN32 machines so this isn't a CPU breakthrough here. That leaves one serious bunch of CPUs.

    I dunno' - I guess if I had buy-in from the agency I work for and loaded RC5 on EVERY machine AND managed to coax the users NOT to turn off their machines at night I'd be able to have 2K+ machines doing this but what big company is going to allow this? In 3 days they went from zero to 2giga. Did that not ramp up over days as software was installed? Perhaps it was remotely installed but still that'd have to be one seriously organized company and administrative staff.

    If this is real, and I'm skeptical, my hat's off to them. Sure wish I could get my employer to do this but we've got brickwalls instead of firewalls :-)
  • I'm not running 10machines here so for my calcs I reduced the keyrate to about 1million per box. I also did some other figuring, if my current employer would do this and we've got 20K+ employees - all with machines - and assuming they all had decent CPUs (*cough*) then we'd blow these guys into the weeds.

    Of course, getting the buy-in would take forever and would require leadership on the part of the managers. It would also require us to have recapped our computer hardware and be up to snuff on every box. Yup, the hope for us ever doing this is pretty dim huh? (smile) Maybe they've got 6 or 7K bokes laying around to get 2gigakeys. If the rate fluctuates up and down a good bit this could be more believable. For now I'm still a bit skeptical but if the d.net admins have confirmed this is correct it's a much needed boost in our overall keyrate and I'm happy to have them aboard. It's been a year plus and I'd really like to move onto something more fun to crunch without abandoning this project like so many have for SETI.
  • Now why dont you sell this computer to the U.S. so you can feed your people ;)

  • It's not E2k and not bogus (Score:3)

    by _Shaft_ ( 35808 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @04:45AM (#1797297)
    It's just 8k computers using the same email.
  • Isn't it amazing that Trasmeta, without any thing, has most people here believers.

    While E2K, on the same boat, with evidence, has most people here yell fraud?
    What an idiotic thing to say. First of all, these E2K rc5 stats are not evidence. Team Slashdot could change its name tomorrow to Team McKinley and claim to be cracking all its keys on a single McKinley chip, but only an idiot would believe us, for many reasons, chief among them being that McKinley does not exist in silicon.

    Elbrus's website has no press release endorsing these people, and you can bet a company as loudmouthed as Elbrus would be shouting from the rooftops if they had a working piece of silicon that cracked keys at that rate.

    Second, as someone already noted, Transmeta has made no real claims about processor performance. Even if they were to make such claims, I would not believe them until I saw a machine that I could boot up and use for real applications. Most sensible people here (the silent majority) would not believe them either.

    ~k.lee
  • Superscalar x86 architectures have been around since the first Pentium, which could also theoretically do 3 instructions per clock cycle (in practice it almost never does). But superscalar does not mean that cracking an rc5 key, let alone several, in a single clock is plausible.

    Let's do the math. Given that overclocked Celeron-464 will give you about 1.3 Kkeys/sec:

    (4.64*10^8) / (1.3*10^3) =~ 3.57 * 10^5 clocks/key

    Given the small working set of rc5, memory latency and cache effects are probably negligible, so I believe this figure is CPU-limited.

    People who are suggesting that the E2K cracks one key per clock cycle are being utterly ridiculous. A "crack rc5" instruction would have to carry out the equivalent of 360,000 P2 instructions. A VLIW/EPIC architecture, like a RISC architecture, depends upon fairly elementary individual instructions, even during vector processing (floating point ops are an exception, but are not relevant since AFAIK rc5 uses integer instructions exclusively). A "crack rc5" instruction would royally fubar the pipeline.

    BTW the above figure is attained using the MMX/bitslice rc5 core, which is explicitly optimized for the P2 architecture's MMX instructions. True, the E2K has a different architecture than a Celeron. However, if E2k were cracking keys, it would be using the x86 client. It is inconceivable that the E2K could execute the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of P2 instructions in a single clock.

    Of course, there are other reasons to believe that this is a hoax, but the technical reasons alone are sufficient to dismiss it out of hand. That Russian team is getting a pretty good keyrate; too bad they had to dress it up in lies.

    ~k.lee
  • They will never be able to execute x86 code at that rate. Even if this E2K was this fast, it would only be this fast at executing its native machine code. The x86 option is just there for compatibility, it's impossible to optimize that much more than AMD and intel have done.
  • probably a hacked client...
  • maybe it's the new playstation
  • I'm surprised at the number of people speculating on the E2K processor from the evidence given. All we have is some guy processing a large number of keys putting "E2K is real power" in his tagline, and all of a sudden people are assuming he's running an E2K processor. I'm not saying it's a fraud, but maybe we're reading too much into this - we're all familiar with how non-English speakers can be easily misinterpreted. Hmmm...
  • That's what the 'explicit parallel' architecture they're referring to is all about: completing several operations at the same time or during the same clock cycle. That was all that older computers and OS's could do (Original DOS for instance). Back then, a megahertz rating on a computer meant everything simply because of the fact that the computers were explicitly serial (only able to do one operation at a time). Now we're getting into computers that operate more like the human brain, where a 'speed' rating is absolutely useless. When was the last time you heard an I.Q. rating related to the physical chemical speed of a persons brain?

    Intel is starting into this field with SIMD, although, you can get the same thing on a different scale with multiproc system and the right OS.

    I'm not saying the figures are right, but that's what they're pointing at.
  • I work with two Russian born engineers and they are constantly telling me about how incredibly backward most of Russia is. They showed me a news article about how most big businesses there can't even get supplies like raw material and food and electricity without resorting to a basic bartering system. Some are paying their employees in canned meat since the employees can trade that for more stuff than they could with cash. I'm not just spewing a "Rah Rah America". I personally find it frightening how fragil **any** national economy can be!
  • That's mostly BS.

    EMP can destroy anything made from METAL and CONDUCTS.

    Do you really think that Russia cared about stupid export laws during cold war? They BOUGHT quipment as companies which are allowed to have it. They STOLE equipment from companies which are allowed to have it. They bought/stole information from manufacturers or OEMs and didn't care about NDAs.

    They even have their own x86 chip clones.
  • I don't agree... You can't always judge a processor by its megahertz. The Athlon can do 3 instructions [amd.com] at a time, and I believe the P3 can as well with its new SIMD. So I don't see why the Elbrus with its explicitly parallel architecture could not theoretically do the same. Although, I still have my doubts that this monkey from chat.ru is legit.

    JOhn
  • yer wrong.

    They're just trying to brute-force one message. Nothing that's directly applicable to any other message.

  • Still, the hacked client thing is a bit of a problem. How do you tell whether the client at the other end of a net connection is legit? Too hard for me, Jimmy.

    Trust is an important thing in distributed computing efforts. Without trust in the computers (and their operators) used in the effort, your results may be invalid.

    In the case of Internet-wide computing efforts, most projects are of the needle-in-a-haystack variety. The server sends the client a portion of the haystack to check, and the client returns whether it found what was being sought in its portion of the stack. If the client returns a positive response (meaning it found what it was looking for), the server can usually quickly verify whether the client is telling the truth or not. This makes the risk of false positives near-zero.

    On the other hand, the risk of false negatives is huge. If a rogue client (or hardware malfunction) returns a negative response for the portion of the haystack it was given, the server usually cannot verify that the results were indeed negative. By doing so, it would duplicate all of the client's work -- it mightaswell have done the work itself in the first place. The risk of false negatives is huge, meaning you may miss that needle in the haystack.

    If you want 100% accuracy, you want 100% trusted machines running 100% trusted programs. The general populous of the Internet just doesn't fit the bill...

  • Chat.ru is an anonymous mail service with webmail or POP3 capabilities - similar to NetAddress or Hotmail.


    So i'm guessing rc5whs@chat.ru [mailto] is nothing to do with large LAN anyway, it's an anonymous mail account, to avoid spam.


    Maybe we should ask distributed.net [distributed.net] guys to clarify this issue a bit? they definitely know what client and how many CPUs are making million blocks a day.

  • Hmm, there should be a way to check if a client
    is bogus, and there is:
    They could just throw one block in where something should be found! (maybe even a few)
    If there are still "nothing found" replies they know what's happening.
    To avoid media hysteria they can even announce that they will do so in some cases.
    R.
  • according to the E2K press releases, the chip has a mechanism (whatever that means) to run x86 programs (or at least has the ability to). So, if it is indeed a E2K, it's just running one of the x86 clients.
  • Umm, I have been living in the US for so long that I don't remember the price in Turkey. You're probably right in your observation, though. I must also point out that I've driven their super cars for the elite too, (a Zil or a Volga or something, that was the most expensive domestic rental car in the part of Russia I visited) and I was not impressed.

    The Czech have been producing Skoda Favorit at about the same price then, and it was far superior to the Lada. But hey, we've digressed enough.
  • Yes, Intel started doing this with the Pentium Pro architecture, and pretty much every x86 design on the block has been doing the same thing, perhaps with the exception of IDT WinChip, which I'm not sure about.

    The x86, hence Pentium, instruction set is a strictly CISC architecture with a lot of features that are not used in the RISC world, i.e. memory-to-memory operations, instructions of varying lengths, etc.
  • Perhaps you meant Dave Ditzel, the ex-Sun microprocessor guru who is supposedly leading the Transmeta CPU design..

    Here [elbrus.ru] is an interesting link that points out Ditzel's relation to Elbrus..
  • I believe Sahin and Kartal should have been BANNED. Heck, they have decimated perhaps 10 percent of the country's driver population in the last 10 years in accidents.

  • Re:Russia doesn't even have modern fabs (Score:4)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @06:04AM (#1797318)
    True, Russia does not have "modern" fabs that match the US/Japanese standards, but it is flat out wrong that they were "decades behind" Western semiconductor technology or designed all their computers/electronic systems with vacuum tube technology. I believe this is a hoax, but there is still a dispute on whether it was the Russians(the team headed by Dr. Boris Babaian, the guy behind E2K project, and Elbrus supercomputers) or the Americans who designed the first superscalar machine. There is no doubt the Soviets had a fully functional, mass produced supercomputers in the late 1970s and early 80s that almost matched their Western counterparts in performance(Elbrus series).

    Besides, McKinley is not the right example to give here. McKinley is still nothing more than a design, while the Alpha is real. As the process technology improves, the current Alpha 21264 and the upcoming 21364 design should still be faster or as fast as McKinley or E2K, unless there is a "quantum leap" kind of innovation in the microarchitecture.

    This particular incident is clearly a hoax, but for God's sake, give the Russians the credit they deserve, guys. They can damn well design advanced microprocessors along a lot of other goodies. Remember, these guys were a superpower not long ago.

    One thing I think the Russians will not be able to design for a long time is a decent car, though. Has anyone here in Slashdot ever driven a Lada Samara?
  • Yes.. Last accident (with computer systems) was
    a year ago... Oh.. and what space station US operates (asides from ISS)? :)
  • This is incorrect. Chat.ru simply offers free e-mail and web space for home pages. So it's not ISP.


    (russian: esli ponimaesh to chego govorish o tom chego ne znaesh.. ili ti specialno?)
  • first off, I'm russian... please abstain from the commie jokes :)
    i moved to the states in 1994..
    At first I was sceptical about the E2K actually being tested somewhere (and yes, rc5 is garbage), but I know one thing - russians have been working on the E2K chip for a while, I'd say at least 15 years. Just last year they picked up a few sponsors, so you never know... The might actually have it running (somewhat) by now.

    i'll do some research on that, methinks...
  • my mother used to drive a 2108 model Samara... We had problems with the carburetor (didn't start very well) but other than that, the car could hold together on Moscow roads.. Which in itself is an achievement, since the highway system in Moscow lacks some serious funding... I'm talking about potholes that could easily ruin a Mercedes in a few months... :)
    The gas mileage on them is pretty impressive, as well, even though Lada engines don't get much bigger than 2 liters..
  • hah.. As far as I know, communism is over :)
    ISP's in russia don't hack their clients... As a matter of fact, ISP's in russia are a lot more strict on some policies than Western ISP's... Surfing the net in Russia is still a privilege for some.

  • Paranoia... I bet you won't say its a fraud if its
    from the US...

    Anyway, the E2K runs x86 instruction as said by the press release. So it runs a lot of the rc5 client.
  • Isn't it amazing that Trasmeta, without any thing, has most people here believers.

    While E2K, on the same boat, with evidence, has most people here yell fraud?

    The irony of slashdot...
  • That press release is nearly six months old. But the implication from the article is it runs from between 1.5-2.5 GHz. It would take thousands of them to have that kind of rc5 key rate, no matter how you cut it.
  • Not necessarily, but you can safely say that a computer running at 2,500,000,000 Hz is not going to be generating 6,700,000,000 keys per second.

  • Re:elbrus e2k (Score:3)

    by cirill ( 69077 ) on Sunday July 18, 1999 @06:38AM (#1797328)
    For those who can read _Russian_ here is another link:

    http://ixbt.stack.net/cpu/e2k-spec.html

    Anybody to translate in details? i'm a bit busy at the moment :-/

    The most interesting things are:
    1. It is not in silicon yet
    2. "... Planned production - 4th qrt. 2001".
    3. One of the former Elbrus designers V.Pentkovsky is working for Intel since 1990-1. (follow the link from the article for details. Funny name, isn't it?)
  • the biggest grin to the P6 for me was the use of "micro-ops" instead of what AMD called them: "RISC ops". Intel has a big problem using the R-word and, it would seem, the V-word...

    They had to use a load-store type approach internally as the read-modify-write type stuff gets messy (impossible?) when trying to do multiple instructions at once. OTOH, CISC is nice for keeping code size small - it still has to crawl in thru those package pins. If you can add water later...
  • Oddly enough, were there ever a nuclear war, much of the US defense would be decimated
    by EMPs from the first attack wave while Russian tube controlled systems would be far far less vulnerable to EMPs and thus would continue to
    function effectively. Good thing this was never put to the test, though. :/

    All our missiles are hardened.
  • Computing one key involves much more than one instruction. I doubt the e2k could do as many instructions as necessary for even one key per cycle, let alone 3 keys per cycle. What are we talking about, hundreds or thousands of instructions per key?

  • It turned out that the incredibly high key-rates were generated by a bogus client. Read what happened in Dave McNett's .plan [distributed.net] or read how the mystery was revealed [rc5.aha.ru] by Maxxim Kochegarov from Russian Team [distributed.net].
  • I didn't see anywhere that the 'entity' doing the cracking was an E2K, except in the primary story submission.

    When someone can show me that the client is on a E2K, then I'll believe and start wondering how it's eating through keys that fast.
  • All fraud / non-fraud argument aside,

    has anyone thought that they might have made

    more than one chip?

    Make 1000 of these chips and you only have

    to be 2.7 time faster than a P2 333.
  • Huh! There wouldn't be any Y2K problems anywhere in the west, US and other countries, then? I bet you wouldn't know how many Y2K problems there have been in the US, for example (well, I don't know either...). The Y2K problem was created just as much by the renowned western scientists as well, but these days the world just is such that where the West had resources to fix at least most of the problems (and thus diminish our fears) the Russians do not have the resources - it is not their computer scientists' fault.

    I find such an attitude against Russian science a joke. I believe the Russians can do anything anyone else can, in science and others areas (oh, well, leading a goverment excused :)
  • Yeah, not like the business with the damned SkyLab that almost crashed to peoples heads (I think it fell in part over Australia). And of course there was that uncredibly stable shuttle explosion the yankees had... I'd say Mir is pretty stable.

    You should go back, say 5-6 years and find out how many accidents the Mir had then. I mean, what can you excpet from a space station that has been in service for well over 10 years.
  • > This kind of news really does bring out the worst out of the Americans in Slashdot...

    It amused me when, in the film "Armageddon", the Mir was portrayed as an ageing rust-bucket.
    Whether or not that is a true representation is debatable. I found it quite hilarious the childish way that the Mir was blown up. It certainly seemed like, "We've not had as successful space station as Mir, so we're gonna blow it up."

    Not that I found any of the film factually correct anyway :)

    Well, you gotta laugh. Its just a shame so many people seem to be suffering from tunnelvision.

    -Iyanus
  • I made one of those for the original B.O. It worked great.


    PDG--"I don't like the Prozac, the Prozac likes me"

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