Bench Press

Some scary news if you’re an IT guy (although promising if, like us, you believe in the power of alternative processors), but basically it shows that the Playstation 3’s super-powered Cell processor really is useful for more than just Metal Gear Solid. 

Brilliant visual depiction of research described below

By using the computational power of a cluster of 200 PS3s, researchers were able to create a fake certificate allowing them to usurp certification authority from Verisign’s RapidSSL public encryption method. What that means is that the researcher’s were able to create their own certificates, meaning that they could fool any browser into believing whatever identity the researchers threw at them. Translated into real-world terms, it means that the researchers could have, had they wanted to, convinced your browser that they were your bank, your ISP, eBay, or potentially a legitimate Microsoft/Apple software update. 

Image of the "Playstation Lab" cluster which executed the hack.

The source of the hack comes from a weakness in using MD5, a popular hash-generating function which is supposed to turn large files into short 128-bit “passwords”. A 128-bit password may not seem like much (imagine converting a 200 page book into a short 200-letter sentence, you can’t recreate the book from that sentence), but the magic is that, like other cryptography methods, it is supposed to be incredibly difficult to create two files with the same MD5 “password” — a so-called “collision”. 

However, MD5 is not perfect, as a computationally intensive means of finding collisions was demonstrated in 2007, and while many certificate authorities had switched away from MD5, there were few who genuinely believed that the computational power was readily available to break it. And, while 200 Playstation 3’s is not super-easy to come by, given the profitability of such a scam, this recent exploit demonstrates that it no longer requires a massive multi-million dollar supercomputer to do the number-crunching needed (the researchers estimated that only $20,000 worth of computing power on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud was needed to generate the fake certificate).

Thankfully, Verisign has confirmed that they are committed to phasing out MD5, and Microsoft and Mozilla have been fully briefed on the risk. Let us hope that is more than just empty promises.

(Image source: Playstation Lab cluster)

There was a time when video game consoles and graphics cards were “just for games.” In those days, game console chips and graphics cards were the domain of little boys, not grown men. Well, thank the stars those days are long gone!

Today, if someone were to tease a grown man for purchasing Sony’s Playstation 3, he could simply reply, “I beg your pardon. I am a grown man, not a little boy. I am clearly using the Playstation 3, not to play great games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid, but to use its TeraFLOPS (1 trillion floating point calculations per second) capacity to solve important and complex scientific problems.”

It almost sounds like a fantasy, but it’s not. The idea behind this is pretty basic. To make games and graphics run smoothly, video game console chips and graphics cards have to do a mind-boggling number of calculations much faster than a basic computer chip can. It “just so happens” that the supercomputers scientists and Wall Street analysts use to do simulations and research with also need to do those same types of calculations. Hence the idea of Stream Processing was born – why not use graphics card/game console chips for things which aren’t directly related to graphics or gaming?

Why not indeed? I can’t list all of the projects out there, but here’s just a snapshot of the scientific applications that people have been able to do with the Playstation 3’s unique chip, IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, and graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD:

• Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research used NVIDIA’s CUDA stream processing platform to improve the speed of their weather forecasting models
• Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna from UMass Dartmouth used 16 Playstation 3’s to simulate the collision of two black holes
• AMD researchers were able to demonstrate the use of AMD graphics cards to let a computer see in 3D and then map that image to an actual physical simulation
• The Los Alamos National Laboratories turned to IBM to design them a new supercomputer, but instead of just designing them with plain vanilla chips from Intel and AMD, they asked for a new breed of computer. Enter the Roadrunner, a computer which when fully operational will be capable of PetaFLOPS performance (1 quadrillion floating point calculations per second), and consists of ~7000 AMD Opteron chips coupled with ~13000 Cell processors
• The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by using 3 NVIDIA graphics processors, was able to help perform biochemical simulations at a submolecular level 100 times faster than 18 typical computer CPUs.

Technology – it’s good for more than just playing games.

Image Credit