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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49
Adam Shostack (adam@homeport.org)
Thu, 4 Mar 1999 13:36:09 -0500
On Mon, Mar 01, 1999 at 07:04:23AM -0500, David R. Conrad wrote:
| On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Vin McLellan wrote:
| > Holding the matrix for a NFS attack on a 512-bit RSA-155 integer is
| > also expected to require about 2.7 times as much memory as the 810 MB in
| > C916 main memory that was used when they factored RSA-140. That's a
| > whopping 2,187 MB.
|
| http://www.altavista.com/av/content/freshindex.htm mentions "state-of-the-
| art two million dollar Alpha 8400 computers with 6 to 8 Gb of RAM and up
| to 400 Gb of disk space each". I wonder if the folks at AltaVista could
| be persuaded to participate in an effort to break such a number.
At the start of the decade, when I dealt with fast iron, one
of the big differences between a high performance computers and
workstations that had similar specs was speed of memory access. If
you need to access lots of data from all over the place, speed of
memory access becomes very important; your 60ns ram thats typical on
todays workstation is two-three times as fast as what Cray shipped
six years ago as its main system memory. So your Cray is not only
faster at pulling the data out of memory, it ends up spending the time
that your workstation will wait spinning instructions.
Smart caches, solid programming, and clever instruction
pipelining can address some of this, but people still pay extra for
Crays because they really do solve some problems faster.
Adam
-- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:49