Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now. But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas. First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in the running Top500's Linpack benchmark application was 1.105 petaflops per second. This was a repeat performance--Roadrunner also finished at the top of the heap in June's report on the biannual rankings, when it became the first supercomputer to cross the petaflop barrier. (A petaflop is a measure of calculations per second, with "peta-" meaning one thousand trillion of them.) The blade servers in Roadrunner use a souped-up variation on the processor found in Sony's PlayStation 3, and the system's nodes are connected via a commodity Infiniband network.

At 1.059 petaflops, Jaguar wasn't far behind. That Cray XT5 supercomputer is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Supercomputing, as the name implies, involves complex equations and a lot of them. It's used to forecast the weather and suss out changes in climate, to foster research in nuclear power, and in locating underground oil reserves, and to help spacecraft get where they're going.

The Linpack benchmark isn't the be all and end all in toting up computing performance, but it does provide the researchers behind the Top500 listings with a fairly consistent way to test performance across disparate systems.

Third place went to an SGI Altix ICE system called Pleiades, based at NASA's Ames Research Center facility, that turned in 487 teraflops ("tera-" meaning a mere trillion). IBM's BlueGene/L finished fourth at 478.2 teraflops (it was second in June at that same performance level) and its BlueGene/P finished fifth, at 450.3 teraflops.

Nine of the top 10 supercomputers in the November rankings are located in the United States, and seven of those--including Roadrunner, Jaguar, BlueGene/L, and BlueGene/P--are at U.S. Department of Energy facilities. The odd computer out, at No. 10, is the Dawning 5000A, located at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center in China.

The U.S. is also the leader overall, with 291 of the 500 high-performance computer systems. Europe has 151 (England first, Germany second) and Asia has 47 (Japan first, China second).

Multicore processors have become the way of the world in supercomputing. A healthy majority of the top 500 uses quad-core processors (336), followed by dual-core chips (153). IBM's PS3 processor variants use nine cores.

Three-quarters of the top 500 (379 systems) use Intel processors, while about 12 percent each use IBM's Power (60 systems) or Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron (59 systems).

The top 10 list

• Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.105 petaflops)
• Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.059 petaflops)
• Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames (487 teraflops)
• BlueGene/L, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflops)
• BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (450.3 teraflops)
• Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.2 teraflops)
• Franklin, Cray, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (266.3 teraflops)
• unnamed, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (205 teraflops)
• Red Storm, Sandia/Cray, Sandia National Laboratories (204.2 teraflops)
• Dawning 5000A, Shanghai Supercomputer Center (results not specified) 0

Rob McMillan at IDG has the scoop on new research that shows it’s possible to partially crack the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption standard. Full details of the theoretical attack is not yet known but McMillan reports that two security researchers — Erik Tews and Martin Beck — plan to discuss the issue at next week’s PacSec conference in Japan. “[They] will show how he was able to crack WPA encryption, in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. The attack could also be used to send bogus information to a client connected to the router.

From the report:

To do this, [the researchers] found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference’s organizer. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack.

To pull off their trick, the researchers first discovered a way to trick a WPA router into sending them large amounts of data. This makes cracking the key easier, but this technique is also combined with a “mathematical breakthrough,” that lets them crack WPA much more quickly than any previous attempt, Ruiu said.

Tews is planning to publish the cryptographic work in an academic journal in the coming months, Ruiu said. Some of the code used in the attack was quietly added to Beck’s Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi encryption hacking tool two weeks ago, he added. It’s important to note, as Thierry Zoller explains, that this is only a partial crack that doesn’t give an attacker access to data transmited over a wireless network. 0

Russian security company Elcomsoft just posted a press release (original PDF) detailing a new method to crack WPA and WPA2 keys:

With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.

The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation; for €599 you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.

This has prompted security firm GSS to advise their clients to add an additional layer of protection to their Wifi networks:

“This breakthrough in brute force decryption of Wi-Fi signals by Elcomsoft confirms our observations that firms can no longer rely on standards-based security to protect their data,” said GSS managing director David Hobson. “As a result, we now advise clients using Wi-Fi in their offices to move on up to a VPN encryption system as well.”

But the question remains how long it will take until the next generation of GPU’s or custom-designed chips will break VPN encryption as well. 3DES DES encryption can already be broken quite easily with custom-built machines, and while AES appears to be better on paper, there is no guarantee that there isn’t some hidden flaw in the algorithm. GSS agrees:

Hobson added that the development could spur a step back from wireless to wired network connection in sensitive installation, such as financial services organisations, particularly concerned about data privacy.

Update: This will, of course, mainly affect simple ascii keys. And it will only work against static keys; anyone using more complicated authentication schemes will not be at risk for now. But since that takes a couple of extra minutes when installing, smaller businesses or departments often skip setting this up.

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