Russian Nuclear Scientists Arrested for Using Supercomputer to Mine Cryptos
Several Russian scientists were arrested today after they transformed the most powerful Russian supercomputer into a cryptocurrency mining rig. The supercomputer capable of 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second), located at Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, was designed for running top-secret nuclear scientific calculations and simulations. But the increased interest for cryptocurrencies, was probably more attractive than the boring research to build the next nuclear super-bomb.
Unfortunate, the scientists were caught while trying to connect it to the internet and no details were given about what kind of cryptocurrency the Russians were trying to mine. On the eve, on February 8, local Russian media reported that the engineers of the Sarov Center used cryogenic power for the supercomputer.
I'm curious, is there any insider with additional information on this case?
Trivia: As February 2018, the entire BOINC network averages about 20 petaFLOPS (source: real time data from the BOINC homepage)
They say here they attempted to mine BTC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43003740
But the whole story is rather unconvincing. Mining Bitcoin is probably the worst choice in this case and I doubt anyone would be so naive to try to connect such a complex machine to the Internet without taking some precautions first.
I read the story on 4 different news sites. The ones going more technically into the topic never used BTC. Agree, would be so stupid to mine Bitcoin instead of many other options... I believe many people do not realize yet that the BTC only represents 35% of the crypto market cap
Also they were saying that the superconputer was from time to time connected to the internet, but a lot of special approvals were needed before the connection. I suspect it was not used only for nuclear simulations, but probably also for data processing (social profiling?)....
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This is hilarious. I wish they got away with it for a little while just to see what would have happen.
Though not exactly the same thing, I can't tell you how often I've wished I could take the computers I find left powered on over night at work and put them all to the task of researching on boinc and gridcoins coming to me.
I know I can't do it but it just feels like a waste of power to let 2 entire floors of a building with desktops just sitting there running screensavers.
this is somewhat not true. newer computer core 2 and onwards and even videocards geforce 8 *i think and up. run on low power when not being used.
for example. lets say like 50 watts when idle and 200 watts if its crunchung. and beside crunching at higher watts = bigger power bill. so its not a waste for a company not to crunch.
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