I guess crypto-currency mining is really hot these days.

GETTY IMAGES

According to BBC news, top scientists working at the Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov(a secret and research facility which made the soviet unions first nuclear bomb during the cold war) were arrested of using one of the country's most powerful supercomputers to mine BTC.

They were handed over to the Federal Security Service(FSB), and a criminal case has been launched against them.

Of course, it is a crime to use one of the nation's most important and powerful infrastructure for their own private use, but they are charged for an another reason, connecting the supercomputer to the internet.

You see, the supercomputer has to be off from the rest of the world for security reasons. Since the computations done of the supercomputers are directly related to nuclear weapons, an accident like hacking or intrusion should never be happened.

However, thanks to the supercomputer's security system, it has alerted to the unauthorized use of the machine and alerted the authority.

If you want to view the original article, hear are the links.
BBC
WashingtonPost

Now lets talk about something more exciting,

How money they could have made, if they weren't caught.

Please note that I'm just doing this for fun, so the actual number may really differ from the actual number, but I would really like corrections in the comments.

Since they don't have to care about the electricty bills and the initial cost of the machines, the calculations will be much easier.

According to BBC, the supercomputer is able to do 1000 Trillion calculations, or 10^15 FLOPS. Converting it to more human-redeable numbers, it is 1 PETA FLOPS.

They couldn't have used the entire resource all at once, so lets say that they have somehow managed to use 10% of the entire resource, which is 100TERAFLOPS(or 10^14FLOPS).

Bitcoin hashing requires integer math, ad flops are a measure of floating point math. So the conversion might be a kind of apples-to-oranges.

PetaFLOPS and how it relates to Bitcoin

But roughly speaking,

1 integer operation = 2 floating point operations
1 hash = 6.35K integer operations
1 hash = 12.7K floating point operations

By those estimates, 1 hash/s requires the equivalent of 12.7kFLOPS/s.
So, 100TFLOPS is roughly 7,874,015,748.03hash/s.
To make calculations easier lets say that the scientists have the 7GHash/s for FREE.

Simple putting in the numbers, if they really mined BTC, they will be getting about 0.1761USD per MONTH.

The results were somewhat predictable, since BTC mining without ASIC is ridiculous nowadays, and noway the government have bought ASICs for supercomputers during nuclear related computations.

Now, lets consider XMR(Monero) mining. As you know, XMR mining is Memory-Intensive, meaning that the speed is heavily related to the time accessing the memory meaning that CPU mining is relatively worth the price.

Lets just say the supercomputer is only made up of CPUs, since some nuclear simulations don't really work well with GPUs.

INTEL XEON E7-8867L(10 cores, 2.13GHZ, 30MB CACHE): 1250H/s
According to geekbench, this CPU is 10.6Gflops in Mandelbrot multi-core scalar.
<The hashrate we can get is (100TFlops)/(10.6GFlops)*1250H/s = 11792452.8302H/s ~ 11MH/s

Using the Monero Mining Calculator, with no electricity bills, they might have been able to earn

USD332.49 k / Month.

The calculations that I have done above might be ridculous to experts in HPC and supercomputers, but as I noted above, I did just for fun and please comment for errors.

But 1 thing is for sure,

They might become real miners, mining with their own hands!!!