Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore have setup a supercomputing cluster of over 1 million Linux kernels as virtual machines. They did so in hopes of better understanding how botnets operate.

"The sheer size of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand in even a limited way," said Ron Minnich, one of the researchers. "Many phenomena occurring on the Internet are poorly understood, because we lack the ability to model it adequately. By running actual operating system instances to represent nodes on the Internet, we will be able not just to simulate the functioning of the Internet at the network level, but to emulate Internet functionality."

Making the project possible, Sandia utilized its Albuquerque-based 4,480-node Dell high-performance computer cluster, known as Thunderbird. it took 250 virtual machines coupled with the physical units in Thunderbird to run the over one million Linux kernels. And this is just the beginning.

"It has been estimated that we will need 100 million CPUs by 2018 in order to build a computer that will run at the speeds we want," said Minnich.

Image Credit: abc.nl