It does seem they worded about the miner to avoid people from knowing its the miner they were running.
The Epic Scale software is actually supposed to do a lot more than simply mining Litecoin. From what I've read, it's mostly just a cryptocurrency miner at this stage but there are plans to expand the range of applications further beginning with genomic computations. According to their
official site, the following gives a general idea of what the software will do once the software is fully developed:
Solving math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more has real world value. We solve these problems on behalf of our trusted partners, and donate proceeds to your favorite charities.
Even with thousands of computers mining for them, is it even getting them anything? I thought CPU mining was so slow compared to GPU and especially ASIC mining that even 1 millions CPUs would essentially be useless for bitcoin mining.
I read a while ago about a supercomputer being used for Doge mining, it wasn't very good, I beleive better than a good GPU, but nothing special, not worth wasting supercomputer time for anyway!
From what I've read, the program actually mines litecoins rather than bitcoins. It's still not the best choice of altcoin since there are many CPU mineable altcoins out there. I've done the calculations and every single one of them suggests that a computer mining LTC will only generate fractions of a cent per day assuming the average CPU is capable of 20 KH/s so I'm not sure what exactly it is that they're trying to achieve.
As for using supercomputers to mine, well it depends on the supercomputer. Some supercomputers use GPUs in addition to CPUs which would have been well suited for mining scrypt-based currencies until ASICs came into the scene in 2014.