Beowulf Questions

[Halpern, Joshua]

SNIP....
>That's what I was thinking. Can you say 1 billion bits of
>RSA encryption? I knew you could :^). My only worry here is
>that with a few hundred thousand nodes, would the NSA be able
>to decrypt stuff relating to national security? That is, could
>the government actually afford to purchase on-site equipment
>that could keep up with P2P, Internet-based clustering, if you
>will? Peronsally, I think they'd have to jump in on the bandwagon
>with everyone else, yet with the current level of "Big Brother
>is wathcing us all" attitude floating around, I seriously doubt
>that people would knowingly allow them to use their free cycles
>for decryption without some mega-serious watch-dogging geeks
>watching their every move.

You are not nearly paranoid enough to work for NSA.  They
would never borrow cycles out of house, for fear that
by looking at what was happening, someone could figure
out what they are doing...

Josh Halpern