Several Russian scientists were arrested today after they transformed the most powerful Russian supercomputer into a cryptocurrency mining rig. The supercomputer capable of 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second), located at Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, was designed for running top-secret nuclear scientific calculations and simulations. But the increased interest for cryptocurrencies, was probably more attractive than the boring research to build the next nuclear super-bomb.
Unfortunate, the scientists were caught while trying to connect it to the internet and no details were given about what kind of cryptocurrency the Russians were trying to mine. On the eve, on February 8, local Russian media reported that the engineers of the Sarov Center used cryogenic power for the supercomputer.
I'm curious, is there any insider with additional information on this case?
Trivia: As February 2018, the entire BOINC network averages about 20 petaFLOPS (source: real time data from the BOINC homepage)