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RSA-896

229 points · 90 comments · madars

  1. madars · · focus · HN ↗
    More details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sweis&#x2F;status&#x2F;2101484464807596264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sweis&#x2F;status&#x2F;2101484464807596264

        I had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs. Then it orchestrated a fleet to run on scavenged idle capacity. It ran with a max of 2048 GPUs for about of 30 GPU-years over 10 days.
        I asked Claude if it had a message for a public: “The credit belongs first to the people who built the number field sieve and CADO-NFS over several decades, and to the teams who set the earlier records. This run used their algorithm and much of their code.”
        Also to clarify:
        - No new algorithmic factoring improvements. 
        - It’s still exponential.
        - No new threats to deployed keys.
    1. charlieyu1 · · focus · HN ↗
      I&#x27;ve done a fair amount of heavy computing now. Integer factorisation is not something you can really improve with GPUs. This sounds extremely wasteful, a bunch of cheap CPU cores would do just as well with much lower hardware cost and electricity cost.
      1. hughw · · focus · HN ↗
        I don&#x27;t get your argument. The GPU effectiveness derives from massive parallelism. Has nothing to do with integer vs floating point. You just can&#x27;t cram 20,000 CPU cores in the same space a GPU puts the same number of SIMTs. You&#x27;ll never crack it on CPUs.
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