The Multiprogram Research Facility (MRF, also known as Building 5300) is a facility at the

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...

in Oak Ridge,

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

. It is used by the U.S.

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

(NSA) to design and build

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s for

cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic se ...

and other classified projects. It houses the classified component program of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project sponsored by the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

(DARPA).

History

The High Productivity Computing Systems program was launched in 2004 as a multiagency project led by DARPA with the goal of increasing computing speed a thousandfold, creating a supercomputer capable of one petaflop (a quadrillion 0¹⁵floating-point operations a second). The project is sited at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and is split into two tracks, one top secret and one unclassified, housed in separate facilities. The secret facility, used by the NSA, is located within Building 5300 at the laboratory and is known as the Multiprogram Research Facility. The MRF was constructed in 2006 at a cost of $41 million. Located on the laboratory's East Campus, the building covers and rises five stories high. As of 2012, it is staffed by 318 computer scientists and engineers. While the unclassified portion of the HPCS project succeeded in designing the 1.3 petaflop

Cray XT5 The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called PowerPC 400#SeaStar, SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 co ...

supercomputer in 2007, the MRF succeeded in developing an even faster machine, designed specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, such as the

Advanced Encryption Standard The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

(AES). A former NSA official called the MRF's breakthrough "enormous", giving the agency the ability to break current public

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

standards. The data upon which the supercomputer operates is stored at the agency's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale,

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. The MRF's next goal is to achieve a machine capable of one exaflop (10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second) and then one zetaflop (10²¹). To achieve an exaflop machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling , called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center. The buildings will store dozens of computer cabinets that will comprise the exaflop machine. The facility will eventually use about 200 megawatts of power—enough to power around 200,000 homes—and will require of cooling equipment.

References

{{authority control National Security Agency facilities Oak Ridge National Laboratory DARPA projects Buildings and structures in Roane County, Tennessee National Security Agency cryptography Supercomputer sites

History

See also

References