State Actor Botnet for Parallel Computing?

Question

I'm reading Keith Devlin's Mathematics: The New Golden Age[0] which although a little out of date, is a really nice layman's tour of advances in mathematics from the 1960s up through the 90s.As you can imagine, there's a lot of talk of using supercomputers and distributed networks to perform difficult calculations, e.g. Mersenne prime search, or large number factorization. That got me wondering about how the computing power of the most powerful known supercomputers compares to the theoretical computing power of the largest know or theoretical botnets.Would it make sense for a state actor like the NSA to use a stealth botnet with 10s or 100s of millions of devices to perform massively parallel calculations as an extension of, or in lieu of, whatever centralized supercomputer they use? How would you (or can you) calculate the power of a botnet of arbitrary size? I'm assuming you'd need to make a lot of assumptions about minimum processor size, etc...[0]http://cup.columbia.edu/book/mathematics/9780231116398

rshnotsecure · Accepted Answer

Hard to imagine running a giant "Beowulf" cluster like this could produce results. Software programs are metastable ("Mythical Man Month" concept), meaning they constantly require maintenance because they are fundamentally entropy decreasing systems. The work to stitch such a system together would be phenomenal considering to simply building a massive data center (which would be simple by comparison ironically).
The "cloud" would be a much better option as it is incredibly powerful and the stability has been encoded into the highly similar hardware. See this classic text, the researcher who originally wrote it was hired by Google [1]
[1] - https://barroso.org/publications/IEEEMicro2021.pdf

GabrieleR · Answer

Its an interesting calculation that can assume some relevance if related to a specific case study (find next sexy prime number). A prerequisite would be to konw the processing power needed to tackle the problem in a definite amount of time. Once you have those contour parameter set you can estimate the scale of the botnet.and last: botnet >> supercomputer in term of scalability since its cost-free and becouse a supercomputer can always be part of the botnet, not the other way around