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I don't understand how they're nuclear engineers and not smart enough deduce someone would notice their supercomputer being connected to the internet.
by lawlessone 9y ago
I don't understand how they're nuclear engineers and not smart enough deduce someone would notice their supercomputer being connected to the internet.
- mtw 9y agoCould be a group of interns
- acidburnNSA 9y agoCan confirm. Work at nuclear research firm, have supercomputer, interns always talking about casually cryptomining on it. It doesn't have too many gpus (we haven't gotten into CUDA driven neutron transport and ray tracing yet) so it'd be a waste.
- xstartup 9y agoRisk of getting caught is always there. But the reward is too high sometimes which makes up for it. Imagine, if they could silently mine for a long time - they'll be able to retire in Bangkok.
- lo_stronzo 9y agoAgreed, sometimes the reward is just too high to simply "pass on an opportunity". We had an undergrad utilize our then, nascent CUDA nodes. But, simple monitoring of the nodes raised a red flag. When we looked into his running jobs, we found an expediently crafted work-flow, where there was no attempt at obfuscation. That is, the user's input files all contained references to various mining sites at that time... Needless to say, privileges were revoked and never restored!
- marvin 9y agoWith a little more thought, this could be done with a less obvious connection to the internet. The just need to transmit the correct hash, which can be done from a different computer. It's just the hash calculation that needs to happen on the supercomputer. Regardless, the Russians obviously don't pay these scientists enough if they have to resort to crypto-mining to pad their salaries ;)