Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined

http://www.thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-network-8-times-faster-than-top-500-super-computers-combined/

by tjaerv • 13 years ago

125 102 13 years ago

thegenesisblock.com

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

Seems like another case of capitalism at work.

a3voices• 13 years ago

I wonder what the alt currencies are up to combined at this point (Litecoin, etc.)

bigiain• 13 years ago

Hmmm, 2 comments.

That shows that the computing capacity required to subvert the bitcoin network is significant - even if the bitcoin-integer-calcuation to FLOP conversion is wobbly, if all of the top 500 (known) supercomputers together cant even get close to the 50% of mining capacity required to manupulate the blockchain - that's a good sign, right?

But... I wonder just what sort of non-public computing power is hidden inside .gov and perhaps .mil domains… I'd be surprised if "they" didn't have machines/clusters that'd blow the "Top (publicly known) supercomputer" out of the water. Whether "they'd" have the combined capacity of the top 500 or not I'm less sure about.

DannyBee2• 13 years ago

What you say about secret sites may once have been true. It is almost certainly no longer.

It is unlikely that at this point, the NSA or others have as much general purpose computing power as, for example, Google.

Why would they? They don't need that much general purpose or floating point performance anymore, because it's reasonable for them to just fab their special purpose own stuff.

I'm sure they have some semi-specialized architectures made for doing their most important analysis tasks very quickly (which may or may not be fast in bitcoin-relevant ways), and for everything else, they have a smaller number of general purpose datacenters.

I can't think of any good reason the NSA would have 1-5 million x86-64 computers laying around, instead of 1-4 million more specialized processors, and a million x86-64.

beering• 13 years ago

Well, you have to have at least a few computers in order to store, index, and analyze all communications in the world, right? puts on tinfoil hat

sneak2• 13 years ago

> Why would they? They don't need that much general purpose or floating point performance anymore, because it's reasonable for them to just fab their special purpose own stuff.

Indeed, the NSA has their own fab.

moconnor2• 13 years ago

The article's comparison is invalid - in HPC computing speed is as much about the network infrastructure as it is the raw number of cores; simulations and graph-processing require interaction between the processing elements. The scores on the Top500 reflect this. In an embarrassingly-parallel application such as bitcoin mining, their peak performance is far higher.

In fact, the theoretical peak of Titan's 19k GPUs would be around 90 single-precision petaflops, comfortably higher than the estimated peak of 2 million reasonably recent x86 processors in Google's data centers (unlikely to be top-of-the-range number crunchers).

I've worked in HPC with a variety of actors for over a decade; I am in no doubt that classified machines exist with more power than Titan and Sequoia (#1, #2), which together make up most of the computing power in the top500 (it follows a power distribution, appropriately).

An exaflop is still a really, really big number though. I can hazard a few guesses at non-public machines in the US that would reach or beat Titan. Perhaps the US Govt commands an exaflop of power spread amongst several agencies, but I wouldn't place any bets on it.

That the bitcoin mining network has reached this scale is both astounding and depressing. That's an awful lot of computing power going to waste.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

They way I understand it is that the money is in specialized hardware. Today already using GPUs is counterproductive for mining. The money made doesn't pay off the electricity used. So the era of specialized hardware has come. The .gov or some such entity with large black budgets could be in a better position to spin their own specialized hardware that doesn't nothing but try to manipulate the block-chain.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

Using dumb math, using Butterfly labs, it would take less than $5 million to match the network (87000 / 50 * 2500).

Titan (the current #1 supercomputer) had a budget of around $100 million. Clearly, the comparison is stupid.

PeterisP2• 13 years ago

For how long do you need to hold 50+% to manipulate the blockchain?

For example, Amazon or Google also hold serious computing power - if they would throw all of it at once for an hour, then it wouldn't be THAT expensive compared to the effect.

bhouser• 13 years ago

"They" don't need to outpace the bitcoin network at its current capacity. All "they" need to do is add enough network capacity so that bitcoin mining with current technology becomes unprofitable. Then many other players who depend on the profitibility of mining will stop.

russellsprouts3• 13 years ago

It would be interesting if the bit coin network could eventually move to doing useful work like folding@home does. That way mining would not just be a waste of resources. Obviously, the current ASICs wouldn't be able to switch.

ricksta• 13 years ago

Bitcoin calculations right now is not really a waste of resource. It's used to "audit" the transactions to make sure no one can double spend any money.

zanny• 13 years ago

The majority of work done on btc is useless though, because very few hashes end up validating into blocks. It would be nice if all that compute power was being used for some productive use, and you just did a consensus raffle rather than arbitrary hashing to pass out new coins.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

Hardly. Bitcoin ran just fine on CPUs. The only reason nobody uses CPUs to mine any more is because everybody else switched to GPUs, which resulted in a difficulty adjustment. In other words, competition for bitcoins upped the required compute power, not anything inherent to producing bitcoins themselves.

jsmeaton2• 13 years ago

After reading the article above, I had an idea for something similar to folding@home. Essentially a business that pays regular people $X to register as a compute unit and charges businesses to use that compute infrastructure for massive map-reduce type jobs.

The trick would be charging just enough to financially compete with something like AWS, and paying just enough to compete with bitcoin mining.

Or it could be a stupid idea - I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if someone smarter than me was able to find an angle that'd make this profitable (or already has?).

wmf• 13 years ago

This has been tried several times over the last 15 years (e.g. United Devices); in general the idle time on random PCs is worth less than the overhead of organizing it.

gwern2• 13 years ago

> Essentially a business that pays regular people $X to register as a compute unit and charges businesses to use that compute infrastructure for massive map-reduce type jobs.

It's been done. That you've never heard of the company doing this indicates how successful it's been.

kybernetikos• 13 years ago

I actually wonder if something along these lines is the real purpose of amazon coins. Amazon is one of very few companys that I have a default assumption that the crazy stuff they do is part of a long term strategy, so the coins stuff is interesting to me. I doubt that the rather superficial analyses we've heard so far are the full story.

AYBABTME2• 13 years ago

All this energy and computing power wasted creating numbers so that we can use them as a currency. If only Bitcoin was computing something useful.

jimktrains22• 13 years ago

What do you think all those VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and AmEX servers, not to mention all the banks, are doing?

AYBABTME2• 13 years ago

They're not computing numbers for the sake of computing numbers.

Imagine a future where Bitcoin dominates the markets. Then you'll have this whole planet dedicated to the computation of hashes for no other sake than computing hashes. Picture yourself an alien civilization, coming to meet us and seeing we spend most of the energy we produce computing numbers and giving them an arbitrary value.

While I think there's a lot of arbitrary stuff going on in the financial world, it's still less arbitrary than computing numbers for the sake of computing numbers.

xtracto• 13 years ago

This is something that has been in my mind for some time: If I understand correctly, the bitcoin generating process is based in computing SHA's.

So, I wonder if those computations could be used for something else? Maybe having a database similar to Rainbow Tables, which allows people to look for previously calculated SHA's to avoid calculating them...

ewillbefull• 13 years ago

Almost any proof-of-work algorithm could be used. However, if you add an algorithm which is useful to the outside, it decreases the cost of attack (since you earn something probabilistically on top of simply a block reward). Depending on what kind of algorithms you use, this could be dangerous for network security.

mikegioia• 13 years ago

Haha, aside from the obvious problems of storing 2^256 hashes somewhere, having a database system that can handle all of the btc client connections, and undermining the actual proof of work system behind bitcoin's credibility, you'd be creating a useless rainbow table that didn't have any common cleartext passwords hashed in it.

manojlds• 13 years ago

What we need is something similar to ReCAPTCHA - use the computations for good while doing the mining.

astrodust• 13 years ago

People spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort digging up precious metals, much to the dismay of local populations that are usually uprooted to facilitate this.

In terms of environmental impact, Bitcoin ranks pretty low on the scale. More energy is wasted with people tuning in to "Dancing with the Stars".

teeja• 13 years ago

They're making money out of thin air. Useful to, you know, people who haven't been able to do that before.

Meanwhile, considering the accuracy of NOAA's WX machines via-a-vis the Europeans. Useful? How about all that nano-trading on Wall Street ... not useful? Blizzard's money machines must be useful to their tens-of-millions of consumers.

kaib2• 13 years ago

Interestingly the reverse is not true.

If you took all the Bitcoin mining machines and made them work on science and engineering tasks they would produce hardly any meaningful output compared to the Top500 systems. The main reason is that Bitcoin mining is embarrassingly parallell while most technical computing algorithms require large amounts of communication. The difference between a Top500 system and a standard cluster is the interconnect.

jasonzemos• 13 years ago

The largest share of top500 machines use Gigabit Ethernet (http://www.top500.org/statistics/list/), which is a reasonable indicator of an embarrassingly parallel application. While that's not quite as slow as the public internet, it's possible some of those applications could fare well with increased parallelism to make up for public internet connectivity.

Bitcoin's computational power numbers aren't relevant for another reason though: it's entirely confined to computing sha256, and only in a special way...

kaib2• 13 years ago

What you want to look at is performance share and not system share. By performance share Gigabit Ethernet is just 12.6%. There are a number of Gigabit Ethernet systems but they are not contributing useful work.

There has also been some discussion lately that Rmax, the performance indicator of Top500 has started to diverge from sustained performance. Sustained performance is a general term for actual science produced with a machine as opposed to performing well on the LINPACK benchmark.

Edit: There is also a huge difference running Gigabit Ethernet over short spans as opposed to over the Internet. Latency as opposed to bandwidth is the limiting factor for many algorithms. Light takes a lot less time to travel across the aisle as opposed to across the continent.

richcollins2• 13 years ago

Why is it's parallelism "embarrassing"

ecdavis• 13 years ago

"Embarrassingly parallel" is a term used to describe problems that can be easily divided amongst processes and require little to no communication between processes.

Xorlev• 13 years ago

Because the payloads are tiny and require almost no coordination compared to many algorithms.

Machines take small work packets and crunch numbers, then pass back results in minutes. For many clusters, various steps of the algorithms require fast messaging for things like MPI.

TL;DR Bitcoin: no coordination during work

cjh_• 13 years ago

It is a common term in concurrency and parallelism that refers to a specific kind of task [1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel

PeterisP2• 13 years ago

Because being good at embarassingly parallel problems is not something to be particularly proud of - the real, hard problems (for which the supercomputers are needed) can't be so parallelized, and the performance & quality of such systems depend on how well they can handle problems that need much more interdependencies between computing nodes than bitcoin.

Achshar• 13 years ago

What about stuff like decoding human genome? A master just has to give out specific sections to each slave and slaves don't need to communicate with each other. Any number of those "scientific games" type of problems can be solved with the bitcoin mining network machines.

alephnil• 13 years ago

Most institutions that have a real supercomputer also has clusters that are used for tasks that does not need fast interconnect. The reason is that there is quite some tasks that does not need fast interconnection, and for those a cluster is OK, and a cluster costs a fraction of a supercomputer.

Tasks in bioinformatics "decoding human genome" is typically of this type, and are generally performed on clusters, even if a supercomputer is available. Where I used to study, applications for CPU time at the supercomputer for workloads that could run on a cluster was generally rejected, and directed to the clusters instead.

seabrookmx• 13 years ago

The author claims the network is dominated by ASICs. Sure, Avalon has made some chips, and Butterfly Labs has released a handlful of their miniature ASIC devices, but I hardly think they dominate the network.

FPGA's are still the largest contributors I would think. Funnily enough the author didn't even mention them in his article.

nwhitehead• 13 years ago

Computing SHA hashes is embarrassingly parallel, but LINPACK is NOT embarrassingly parallel. LINPACK, like many scientific applications, requires a fair amount of communication. Comparing hashes per second to LINPACK scores is really apples to oranges. A better comparison is to simply add up numbers of similar GPUs and CPUs and ignore all the benchmarks.

Bitcoin enthusiasts should also consider that the Top500 is not an exhaustive list; governments have much more computational power than is on the list.

mkarttic• 13 years ago

how would the computing power of botnets compare to this?

Granted, its more about network resources than calculations of the bitcoin kind.

According to [1], botnets control bots by the millions, and have the capacity to send billions of spam mails a day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botne...

edit: grammar.

DasIch• 13 years ago

In the case of a botnet you would have to consider whether you go by the number of calculations each machine a bot runs on can perform or whether you consider the number of calculations each bot can perform with the risk of detection remaining insignificant.

Realistically you would have to go with the latter in that case I don't think the computing power of most if not all botnets would account for much.

ck2• 13 years ago

If only all that cpu power was doing folding or some kind of humankind benefit other than profit, or at least in addition to profit.

zer0gravity3• 13 years ago

Bitcoin algorithm should be rethought in order to be used for valuable computation not just useless hashing. At this point it's a waste of energy, but that doesn't mean we can't turn it into something useful. I believe we really need to ask ourselves: "What are we trying to accomplish here?". Are we trying to create just a digital medium that promotes the same old selfinterest, or are we trying to create a new kind of system that transcends the individual?

M4v3R• 13 years ago

It's not "useless hashing". The computations are neccesary to secure the network and process transactions. It's not possible to just swap the algorithm to do something entirely different and still achieve the goals of Bitcoin network.

Nursie• 13 years ago

The only way using masses of computing power gives you security is by making the 51% attack harder.

To me the whole thing is a manifestation of the bizarre way BTC are handed out, by competitive mining. (No, I don't have a better solution, but can't you see the issue here, the same amount of BTC are created but ever more power is being used)

treelovinhippie• 13 years ago

The ultimate thing would be for a cryptocurrency to be based on thoughts/comments/ideas, but nobody has quite cracked how to quantify the value of those yet. So the best idea in this space I've managed to get to so far is to have the network process big data to find meaningful patterns.

Not only could the value of the big-data-backed cryptocurrency grow in value off the speculation, you could charge companies to upload/stream their data into the network and essentially have a giant distributed supercomputer processing it and searching for patterns. Then share a percentage of any revenue with the miners as an added bonus.

I feel we're already at the point where more data is produced than our ability to process, understand and extract useful insights from that data. And the rate at which global data is produced appears to be on a never ending exponential growth curve.

So in one swoop you could lay the foundations for a global distributed currency whilst harnessing the collective computing power of the Internet to solve humanity's problems, gain tremendously powerful insights into human behaviour at all levels from micro to macro, make us more efficient as a species and eventually the potential to become the global AI that feeds off all data streams; constantly feeding in, being processed, recorded, analysed, and subsequently feeding the computed knowledge into agents that make real-world decisions and actions.

If anyone has thoughts, skills or interest in this... hit me up.

zer0gravity3• 13 years ago

> So in one swoop you could lay the foundations for a global distributed currency whilst harnessing the collective computing power of the Internet to solve humanity's problems, gain tremendously powerful insights into human behaviour at all levels.

Exactly, I think it is possible to create a distributed cyptocurrency and use that computation for something useful in the same time.

mseebach4• 13 years ago

> Are we trying to create just a digital medium that promotes the same old selfinterest, or are we trying to create a new kind of system that transcends the individual?

So, currency is more than anything the medium that enables trade. Trade enables specialisation and cooperation on a massive scale. If the scope and benefit of global trade doesn't "transcend the individual", I struggle to think of anything that does.

The classic "I, Pencil" essay[1], while written even polemically in support of capitalism, also serves as a great example of the scale of human cooperation enabled by currency.

1: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

zer0gravity3• 13 years ago

Yeah, trade transcends the individual, but profit based capitalism does not. If your utility function is profit, you will get egotistical behavior. What we should really try to maximize is the number of smiles in this world, because that, I think, is a better measure of the success of a society. We should really strive to feel better not to have more. Money is an instrument that favors egotistical thinking, counting what we have, but funny enough, we seem to feel better when we give more, not when we get more.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

Why spend so much computing power on $ 2 billion worth of coinage? Isn't the cost of that computer power more?

brazzy3• 13 years ago

Not even close. According to http://realtimebitcoin.info/ about 5 MW are used for Bitcoin. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source that would cost somewhere between 250 and 1000 USD per hour. So at most it's about 8.7 million USD (or 0.7% of the total market price of all bitcoins) per year. That's not much at all to support a functioning currency (whose true macroeconomic value is in enabling the exchange of goods and services, not the market price).

An interesting aspect of Bitcoin is that the amount of computation it requires is designed to scale up with the amount of available computation power, independant of the amount of transactions. Miners cannot increase the rate at which new bitcoins are "mined" - geting more computation power only increases their share. Thus it makes no sense to spend more money on the hardware and electricity for mining than the (basically fixed) rate of newly mined coins are worth.

Bitcoin Network Speed 8 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined

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