The Cray-2, the world’s fastest computer until about 1990, was capable of almost 2 GigaFLOPS (Billion Floating Point Operations per Second) – at an inflation-adjusted price of over $30 million. A decade later, ASCI Red – selling for a cool $70 million or so – topped one teraFLOPS (Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second). The machine was twice as expensive, but the price per performance had dropped from ~$15M/GFLOPS (Cray) to ~$70K/GFLOPS (ASCI Red). That’s a shocking improvement. Moore’s Law would have us believe in a ~32x gain over the course of a decade, but real-world supercomputers delivered over 200 … Read More → "Toward Ten TeraFLOPS"

Imagine if you woke up one morning, and found out that Walmart was now selling a device for $5 that could easily and instantly open almost any deadbolt lock. That’s right – the kind of lock that is supposed to give “extra protection” to just about every door on earth. That’s the magnitude of security problem posed by the Heartbleed Bug.

Contributing columnist Bruce Kleinman wrote the first half of this article and posted it to his “From Silicon Valley” blog on April 6, 2014.  The timing of the post was a remarkable coincidence: just 36 hours before the Heartbleed … Read More → "Heartbleed: Serious Security Vulnerability"