Contractor convicted of pinching supercomputer cycles to mine cryptocurrency An IT contractor has been found guilty of pinching his employer’s supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency. The un-named man was employed at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), an outfit that made critical contributions to WiFi and operates the Parkes Radio Telescope that received the …
"he scored approximately AU$9,400 (US$6,800) of bitbucks but burned through AU$76,000 ($55,000) of compute time"
Which is why fraud is the only economic way to create cryptobucks now - the equivalent of "slush" printing. This doesn't bode well for the long term viability of these "currencies". At least the greenback can generally be assumed to be legitimate.
This happens all the time, it's never a crime for the police to lie (or simply have no real clue) about the value for the "crime" - they just declare a value but nobody ever investigates it.
A super computer generated less than half a Btc, what was it doing, did he modify the screensaver?
When I was involved with the support of the UK Met. Office's IBM Power 775 systems, and their eventual decommissioning about 5 years ago, there were several weeks where the systems had to be kept operational and fully functional as a backup for their replacement, but no forecasting jobs were being scheduled on the systems.
The system manager gave me carte blanche to run any jobs I wanted.
Unfortunately, being on the support rather than the application side, I did not have anything more than jobs to test various parts of the scheduler, but in theory I could have had significant time on two top 200 (they were still very powerful) and two smaller supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency.
The decommissioning was a wonder to behold. Apart from some initial preparation work scrubbing the volume data storage, all 4 supercomputers were still in an operational state at 08:00 on the Monday, and completely removed from the machine halls and in trucks by about 19:00 on the Thursday evening, with a day's contingency. All that was left was the cooling water pipework and power sockets.
And the decommissioning crew consisted of an IBM Fellow and more Distinguished Engineers than you could shake a stick at plus some field engineers, in total more than half of the engineering team for these systems from the US.
I think they had an incentive to complete the job early, as their flights back to the US were not until the weekend, and they ended up with an extra day doing the tourist thing!
Really don't know. When the systems went out of the loading bay, my role and interaction with that team came to an end, and I never got to talk to them again.
Bit of a shame, they were really decent people to know, and literally the cream of IBM hardware talent with more than a century of design experience between them,
As a result, they've probably been RA'd by now!
There is a lovely urban myth about Margaret Thatcher and The Met Office, regarding their asking for funding for a new super computer. She told them that if they could accurately predict the weather for 30 days then she would consider their request. For the next 30 days the weather forecasts were very much spot on, resulting in Mrs T saying that since they could now forecast the weather correctly then why did they need a new computer?
It's a super computer being run on a bureau/cloud compute basis...
System idle time has zero cost until someone actually wants to use it at which point it has a price. So the AU$76,000 is what they would have billed a paying customer for the compute time used.
So moral of the story, if you want to make money mining cryptobucks, don't pay for compute time on someone else's machine.
>Don't forget the electricity cost isn't $0
I had thought of that, however, given the organisation: Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, I suspect they get fully funded to run the supercomputer 24x7 - or someone is p*ss poor at writing funding bids....
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