Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to produce dumb cryptocurrency

Wow. Shibe-faced Dogecoin illicitly mined on Ivy League supercomputer. Amaze!

Love of money can cause people to do unwise things—like stealing time on your university's resident supercomputer to mine crypto-coins. The Harvard Crimson is carrying the story of someone who did exactly that: an unnamed individual who was discovered using Harvard's Odyssey supercomputing cluster to generate dogecoins.

"Wow," you might say, amazed. Dogecoins are one of the multitude of roll-your-own cryptocurrencies that have lately sprouted like weeds in an unkempt vegetable garden. Like most of them, the code that powers Dogecoin's blockchain and network is forked from Litecoin, which was originally billed as a lighter-weight alternative to Bitcoin. Dogecoin (and Litecoin and Coinye and many others) use the scrypt cryptographic algorithm to generate hashes and drive the currency along; media-darling Bitcoin, on the other hand, is based around a different algorithm (SHA256). The currencies are all similar to each other, though they are (generally) incompatible and (typically) do not interoperate. (There are caveats, but cryptocurrencies are complex and I'm trying to keep this relatively short—check here for the full details on how and why cryptocurrencies work.)

It is not stated in the Crimson's piece whether the individual caught mining Dogecoins was a student or a faculty member. However, according to Harvard Assistant Dean for Research Computing James A. Cuff, the person responsible has lost access to "any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis." Using university property—like the 4,096-core Odyssey supercomputing cluster—for profit or personal gain, or even any non-research tasks, is most definitely against the rules.

The obvious question to ask here, after we get all of the "Wow" and "Amaze" out of the way, is how many dogecoins the illicit mining operation was able to carve out of the blockchain before being disabled. The answer, though difficult to estimate, is "such dogecoin" or possibly "many currency." According to its page on, Harvard's Odyssey is an x86 cluster made up of Dell PowerEdge M600 servers running on 2.3GHz Intel Xeon E5410 CPUs. It contains a total of 4,096 cores and has churned out a Linpack (Rmax) score of 32.4 trillion floating point operations per second.

Harvard's Odyssey cluster shortly after commissioning.
Enlarge / Harvard's Odyssey cluster shortly after commissioning.

That is "much" teraflop, but CPUs aren't as well adapted to running the kinds of algorithms cryptocurrencies depend on. What one cares about when examining a CPU, GPU, or ASIC's aptitude at mining is how many cryptographic hashes it can calculate per second—more is better, because the more hashes per second you can throw at the currency, the higher your chance of matching the magic hash needed to correctly identify a valid block and score a reward (again, yes, I know it's more complicated than that, but that's the short version).

Some quick checking shows that the Xeon E5410's slightly slower little brother, the E5405, kicks out about 18,800 hashes per second when mining Litecoin—and since Litecoin and Dogecoin use the same scrypt algorithm, performance is equivalent between the two currencies. If we give the E5410 another 200 hashes per second to account for its faster speed (and to make our back-of-the-napkin math easier), then we can estimate that the 4,096-core Odyssey cluster could generate a maximum of about 20,480,000 hashes per second, or 20 Mhash/second (each E5410 has four cores, so 4096 ÷ 4 × 20).

Is 20 Mhash/sec a lot? Well—yes, but it's also not ludicrous. You'd get the same performance out of 13 AMD 7990 video cards, and without using a whole data center full of electricity and cooling, too. The not-yet-shipping Acor ASICS A1 miner promises to deliver 30 Mhash/sec in a single small box—though buying cryptocurrency mining hardware sight-unseen is not without its problems.

Harvard postdoc fellow Timothy R. Peterson told the Crimson it's possible that, if the Odyssey cluster had been hashing away uninterrupted for a number of days, the cluster could have generated "hundreds, and perhaps thousands" of dollars in Dogecoins. Also unknown is whether the mastermind behind the Dogeheist has kept his or her earnings, or if they cashed out via an exchange.

Either way—wow. Many dollars. So rule-breaking.

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