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 U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research an ...

in Oak Ridge,

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to ...

. It is used by the U.S.

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level 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, collectio ...

(NSA) to design and build supercomputers for cryptanalysis and other classified projects. It houses the classified component program of the

High Productivity Computing Systems High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002–10 timeframe. The HPC Challenge (High-perf ...

(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 Adv ...

(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 Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to kn ...

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 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, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can dec ...

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

Bluffdale Bluffdale is a city in Salt Lake and Utah counties in the U.S. state of Utah, located about south of Salt Lake City. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 17,014. From 2011 to 2013, the National Security Agency's (NSA) data stor ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

. 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