March 2nd., 2006. Back to IT Plus

The machine that Alan Turing, working at Bletchley, blanched at: its use in aiding the Wehrmacht.
A very good book to read about this is 'Ultra Goes to War', by Ronald Lewin, 1978 (Hutchinson: 0-09-134420-4).
The current search, using modern computers to crack the three remaining codes.
The idea that Google has such a need for power that it is thinking of a nuclear plant.
The hand powered Colossus which had a tape that could be powered using pulleys.
That's the answer: clockwork, pulleys powered by the feet of the massive number of prisoners languishing in the US system. Three strikes and you could run Google? Well, that would be better than nothing? As the threat of power meters, water meters, and brown-outs comes to a home near you.

Above is General Guderian's command vehicle, in France, June 1940. The Enigma machine is in use on the front left. Below is Bletchley's Colossus, used in breaking the code. Note that it could be operated using pulleys. A marvellous precursor of the vacuum tubed monstrosities.


Times of London

Grandmother and former intelligence worker Ann Mitchell from Edinburgh uses an Enigma machine.
(David Cheskin/PA)

Idling computers crack Nazi Enigma codes

Stefan Krah, a German-born cryptologist from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, started the network in January after writing a programme that combined the brute force of connected computers with a mathematical formula based on previous codebreaking work.

He offered the software to readers of two online bulletin boards with the words: "Clearly the project is from the 'Because we can' department. Is it realistic to hope that anywhere between 10-100 people would take part?"

Today Mr Krah said was amazed by "the exponential growth of participants. I was the only participant when it all started on January 9. About five people joined and participated regularly after I announced it on the lfs-chat mailing list," he wrote in an e-mail.

Together the computers are now marching through the 150 million million million permutations of each letter that made the Engima, which was used to direct devastating U-Boat attacks against Allied shipping in the Atlantic, the most feared encoding machine of the war.

So confident were Nazi commanders in the Engima that even when its messages were clearly being decoded by mathematicians at Bletchley Park, Britain's secret codebreaking base in Buckinghamshire, they refused to believe that the machine itself had been compromised, instead thinking spies were tipping off the Allies about the location of U-Boats in the Atlantic.

The first success of Mr Krah's "M4" project, named in honour of the final, upgraded Enigma that managed to perplex Alan Turing, the brilliant British logician credited with the breaking of the code, came on February 20.

From the scramble of 196 letters, passed 63 years ago through the Enigma's four decoding rotors, came the message:

"Forced to submerge during attack, depth charges. Last enemy location 08:30h, Marqu AJ 9863, 220 degrees, 8 nautical miles, (I am) following (the enemy). (Barometer) falls (by) 14 Millibar, NNO 4, visibility 10."

The location of the sender and a check of existing records showed that the message was sent by Kapitänleutnant Hartwig Looks of U264, a German submarine that was eventually sunk in the North Atlantic in February 1944 by depth charges from the British sloops HMS Woodpecker and HMS Starling.

Mr Krah said today that the first message was deciphered by just 45 machines. The failure, so far, of the combined power of thousands of hard drives has raised the question of whether the last two will ever be cracked. "Of course there is no guarantee that another break will occur at all, there is simply a fair chance," he said.

The two messages facing Mr Krah and his allies were first published in Cryptologia, an academic journal, in 1995 by Ralph Erskine, a naval historian from Belfast. The codes were among the thousands that sat, unbreakable, for ten months during 1942 as the Allies struggled to catch up with the M4 upgrade of the Enigma.

Unbreakable? The remaining messages:

HCEY ZTCS OPUP PZDI UQRD LWXX FACT TJMB HDVC JJMM ZRPY IKHZ AWGL YXWT MJPQ UEFS ZBCT VRLA LZXW VXTS LFFF AUDQ FBWR RYAP SBOW JMKL DUYU PFUQ DOWV HAHC DWAU ARSW TKCF VOYF PUFH VZFD GGPO OVGR MBPX XZCA NKMO NFHX PCKH JZBU MXJW XKAU OD?Z UCVC XPFT

TMKF NWZX FFII YXUT IHWM DHXI FZEQ VKDV MQSW BQND YOZF TIWM JHXH YRPA CZUG RREM VPAN WXGT KTHN RLVH KZPG MNMV SECV CKHO INPL HHPV PXKM BHOK CCPD PEVX VVHO ZZQB IYIE OUSE ZNHJ KWHY DAGT XDJD JKJP KCSD SUZT QCXJ DVLP AMGQ KKSH PHVK SVPC BUWZ FIZP FUUP

(Note that the above two code blocks are set out in groups of four letters).

Shocking news for power users

If Google is worried that its giant servers will struggle to find the electricity they need, what hope is there for domestic PC owners?

Jack Schofield
Thursday February 23, 2006
The Guardian

If you want to start a rumour, how about that Google is going to build its own nuclear power station? The logic is easy. Larry Page, the company's co-founder, reportedly sees "running out of power" as the biggest potential threat to Google, and the electricity needed to run its "server farms" - tens of thousands of power-hungry computers storing billions of internet pages - could soon cost more than the hardware. Partly this is because Google is based in California, where the state solved its 2001 energy crisis by borrowing $10 billion to buy electricity at massively inflated prices. But the rest of us are heading in the same direction.

We live in a world where the use of chip-based computers and consumer electronics devices is increasing rapidly, while supplies of oil and natural gas are diminishing perhaps even more rapidly. Worse, the threat of global warming means we should now be decreasing our energy use, like the Japanese, not increasing it. And although each individual PC or peripheral may not use much electricity, when you have a billion of them, it adds up.

For home users in the UK, of course, most conservation efforts should be applied to heating and hot water systems, which account for about 85% of the energy used in homes, compared to about 13% for lighting and electrical appliances. The top priority is loft insulation, which is why the government offers grants for it. Double glazing, blocking draughts, drawing curtains, lagging hot water tanks and turning down thermostats all make a difference. So does swapping 100W light bulbs for high-efficiency 20W versions, and turning off electrical equipment such as TVs and PCs at the plug. (Standby mode uses surprising amounts of energy.

Powering down

Sadly, it's impossible to say how much power a PC uses without measuring it, because of variables such as the type of motherboard, the speed of the chip and the power of the graphics card. (A fast graphics card can use more power than the processor.) PC power supplies can range from about 150W to about 650W, and will actually draw more than that during peak loads. However, PCs use much less power when idling and the US Energy Star programme - which PC manufacturers have been following since 1992 - is aiming to get the power consumption on idle below 50-60W.

The simplest approach is to use the PC's power-saving software to turn the screen and hard drive off and then suspend the whole system after a specified time. The most expensive option is to use a screen saver that "donates" processor cycles to a worthy cause, but will run your PC at a high level most of the time. PC Pro magazine found that it cost £79 a year to run an Athlon Shuttle PC with normal use (eight hours a day then switched off), but running SETI@home made that £400.

The situation is improving thanks to market trends towards flat screens and the use of portables rather than desktop computers. LCDs use much less power than traditional monitors, and by design, most notebooks use less power than most desktops. At the extremes, the 1GHz Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage chip uses only 5W whereas Intel's hottest chip for gaming, the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, can consume up to 115W.

However, Intel has done a U-turn on its processor design goals, which should help. The Pentium design drove up clock speeds (and power consumption) to build the fastest chips. In 2002, Intel executives still assured me that "gigahertz is far from over" and looked forward to a 4.7GHz Pentium codenamed Tejas. In 2005, however, still short of 4GHz, they announced a new mantra: "performance per Watt".

Alistair Kemp, a spokesman for Intel, says the company has now developed "a new microarchitecture that will be coming out in the second half of this year". New chips codenamed Merom (for notebooks), Conroe (for desktops) and Woodcrest (for workstations and servers) will, he says, "reduce average power use quite substantially". With Conroe, the reduction will be from about 95W, for a fast Pentium 4, to about 65W.

Performance per Watt is also important for the arrays of servers in corporate data centres. Luiz Andre Barroso, principal engineer at Google, has already warned that "the possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiralling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."

In an article called The Price of Performance in the professional journal ACM Queue (http://tinyurl.com/m4udr), Barroso expressed concern at the cost of providing computers, with electricity overtaking the cost of buying the hardware in the first place. Running costs are exacerbated because companies generally try to utilise their servers as heavily as possible 24/7, or 8,760 hours a year. Faster processors also generate more heat, so computer rooms require extra cooling. This uses more electricity, costing more money.

Cool solution

Of course, there's nothing new about any of this. The late Seymour Cray, the world's greatest supercomputer designer, spent a lot of his time on plumbing. In 1985, he resorted to pumping a non-conducting liquid called Fluorinert over the Cray 2's electronics to cool them. When mainframes ruled the world, IBM packed its mainframe chips in ceramic Thermal Conduction Modules with chilled water flowing through pipes to conduct away the heat. Some of today's high-performance games PCs use similar techniques, and it's still an option for servers - but no one really wants to go back to plumbing.

In his article, Barroso suggests that multiprocessor chips are "the best (and perhaps only) chance to avoid the dire future envisioned above". What has changed recently is that multicore processors - with more than one processing element on a single die - have finally entered the mainstream, and many PC manufacturers are now shipping systems with Intel Core Duo processors that deliver more performance per watt than their forebears.

Indeed, the idea has even reached the home market. Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console has a processor with three IBM PowerPC cores, each of which can run two programming threads: the result is a single chip that can work like six. Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3 will use an IBM Cell chip with multiple processing elements.

Not even low-power multicore chips will solve the power consumption problem permanently, but they should at least buy us a few years breathing space.

And if people factor the cost of power consumption (and cooling, where required) into their computer purchasing decisions, both for commercial and ecological reasons, this will put pressure on the manufacturers to do even better in the future.

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