Tag Archive for: supercomputers

Ukrainian hackers take out hundreds of Russian space research servers and supercomputers


The cyber warfare between Russia and Ukraine continues as hackers from the latter launch an attack and destroy the database and infrastructure of Russia’s Far Eastern Research Center of Space Hydrometeorology, “Planeta”.

According to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the attack resulted in two petabytes of data and 280 servers being destroyed. Additionally, a digital array valued at US$10 million was also lost in the attack, as well as disabling the research centre’s supercomputers beyond repair through the destruction of software.

“One such computing device together with software costs US$350,000. In the conditions of strict sanctions against Russia, to get such a software again it is impossible,” wrote Ukrainian Defence.

Data included satellite and meteorological data used by the Roscosmos space agency, Russian Defence, emergency situations ministries and other government departments.

Adding salt to the wound, airconditioning, emergency power, and humidification systems were also disabled.

“In total, dozens of strategic companies of the Russian Federation, which work on ‘defense’ and play a key role in supporting Russian occupation troops, will remain without critically important information and services for a long time,” the agency added.

“Glory to Ukraine!”

The attack is the latest in a series between Ukraine and Russia, with the latter recently disabling Ukraine’s largest telco, Kyivstar.

The attack, which occurred in December last year, resulted in service outages the telco originally said were the fault of a technical failure, before confirming a cyber attack.

The attack left Kyivstar’s over 25 million customer base, over half the country’s population, without mobile and home internet services.

A day after the incident, the attack was claimed by Russian hackers from the Solntsepek group, which said they wiped thousands of servers and 10,000 computers.

“We, the Solntsepek hackers, take full responsibility for the cyber attack on Kyivstar. We destroyed 10 thousand computers, more than 4 thousand servers, all cloud storage and backup systems,” said the group on Telegram.

“We attacked Kyivstar because the…

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Luxembourg bets on supercomputers | Financial Times


Cyber attacks are unlikely ever to be eliminated, according to some experts.

“Prevention of security issues is a lost cause,” says Koen Maris, cybersecurity leader at management consultancy PwC Luxembourg. He says that, for organisations, it is better to detect and eliminate an attack as early as possible, instead of “putting all your money in the prevention basket”. 

There certainly is money available. For a country with a population of less than a million people, nearly half of whom hold foreign nationality, the Luxembourg cybersecurity industry is booming. According to LuxInnovation, the national innovation agency, the Grand Duchy has 310 companies working in the field, 80 of which have cybersecurity as their core business. A third of start-ups have cybersecurity as their core.

By comparison, the UK, with a population more than 100 times larger, at 67m, had 1,200 cybersecurity companies at the end of 2019 — less than four times the number in Luxembourg.

Franz Fayot

“We see cybersecurity not only as a defence issue, but also as an economic success factor,” says economy minister Franz Fayot. 

An organisation called Security Made in Lëtzebuerg, set up by the Ministry of the Economy, provides cybersecurity services free of charge. Its UK and French counterparts, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), both stem from the French ministry of defence and the UK’s intelligence organisation GCHQ respectively.

“This subtle difference in focus means that the ecosystem [in Luxembourg] is more strongly geared towards business needs, rather than those of the military,” says Laurent de la Vaissière, partner at management consultancy KPMG.

The EU is hoping its investment in supercomputers can help find new coronavirus drugs © AFP via Getty Images

The Luxembourg government is not just focused on protection, but also on supporting its financial industry and remaining an attractive business partner. Investment in expanding technological capacity and infrastructure continues, with projects including MeluXina, a €30m supercomputer that is expected to be completed in May. It is backed by the…

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Cray gives its supercomputers 33 percent more cores with Ivy Bridge upgrade

The Cray XC30 supercomputer, now with Intel Ivy Bridge.
Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. announced today that it is now equipping versions of its Cray XC30 massively parallel processing supercomputer series with “Ivy Bridge” based Xeon E5-2300 v2 processors. The switch to Ivy Bridge—in both air and water-cooled versions of the two supercomputer lines—will give the systems more cores, better performance, and higher energy efficiency. In addition to the XC30 updates, Cray is also adding the Ivy Bridge processors to its CS300 cluster supercomputers.

The XC30 line, previously known as “Cascade,” is a hybrid next generation high performance-computing platform that uses multiple processor and coprocessor technologies, including Intel’s Xeon Phi parallel processing coprocessor. Designed for a wide array of high-performance applications, it in some ways mirrors the architecture of Tianhe-2, the Chinese supercomputer currently at the top of the TOP500 ranking of supercomputer systems. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer, built by Cray, uses AMD Opteron chips and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and is currently in second place on TOP500.)

Developed by Cray in collaboration with DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program, it runs on Cray’s Linux Environment and packs up to 384 processors per cabinet. Processors are paired in compute nodes that have 32 to 128 gigabytes of memory, which are connected to each other by a 500 gigabit-per-second switching fabric called the Dragonfly Interconnect.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Supercomputers at Livermore Lab analyze computer behavior – KABC

LIVERMORE, Calif. (KGO) — Scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab are taking a new approach to security over the Internet: using their huge supercomputers to analyze computer behavior for suspicious activity. A firewall protects a computer by filtering out …
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