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From: pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.misc
Subject: Worm CPU usage.
Message-ID: <7600@well.UUCP>
Date: 9 Nov 88 09:55:22 GMT
Organization: Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, Ada Lovelace Cabal
Lines: 23

I've been thinging about how many CPU cycles the worm used in its
short but sweet rampage.  People have been tossing around the number
6000 for systems infected.  (Where did this number come from?)  Let's
say these machines averaged 2 MIPS each, and wildly guess that the
average length of infection was a day.  That comes out to (kachunk
kachunk) one quadrillion instructions.  This may well be the most CPU
power expended so far on a single problem.

Now, if we could harness that kind of power for useful work...  Imagine
a net-wide distributed ray-tracing service.  If you want something traced,
you send the NFF to a central clearinghouse.  All over the net, people
start ray tracing servers when they leave for the day.  These servers
connect up to the clearinghouse and fetch the scene description, and a
list of pixels to trace.  By morning, hundreds of scenes have been traced
and returned to their senders.  (Close your mouth, you're drooling.)

By the way, I spent Sunday doing the PostScript artwork for a worm
t-shirt.  Anyone interested in ordering one?
---
Jef

             Jef Poskanzer   jef@rtsg.ee.lbl.gov   ...well!pokey
      "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" -- Ronald Reagan