Boffins at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore have wired a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. The achievement will allow insecurity experts to observe behaviour found in botnets.

Top boffin Ron Minnich said that botnets are difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world. By using virtual machine (VM) technology and the power of its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration. Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer allows cyber researchers to watch how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks.

Boffins had only been able to run up to 20,000 kernels concurrently, but the more kernels that can be run at once, he said, the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem. Once the computer can emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, it will be able to ‘virtualize’ and monitor a cyber attack.

Sandia used its 4,480-node Dell high-performance computer cluster, known as Thunderbird. Researchers ran one kernel in each of 250 VMs and coupled those with the 4,480 physical machines on Thunderbird. Dell and IBM both gave a hand with the experiments, as did a team at Sandia’s Albuquerque site that maintains Thunderbird and prepared it for the project.