The Multiprogram Research Facility (MRF, also known as Building 5300) is a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It is used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to design and build supercomputers for cryptanalysis 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 (DARPA).
The High Productivity Computing Systems program was launched in 2004 as a multiagency project [1] led by DARPA with the goal of increasing computing speed a thousandfold, creating a supercomputer capable of one petaflop (a quadrillion [1015] floating-point operations a second). [2] [3] 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. [2]
The MRF was constructed in 2006 at a cost of $41 million. Located on the laboratory's East Campus, the building covers 214,000 square feet (19,900 m2) and rises five stories high. As of 2012, it is staffed by 318 computer scientists and engineers. [2] [4]
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 (AES). A former NSA official called the MRF's breakthrough "enormous", giving the agency the ability to break current public encryption standards. The data upon which the supercomputer operates is stored at the agency's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. [2]
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 260,000 square feet (24,000 m2), 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 60,000 short tons (54,000 tonnes) of cooling equipment. [2]
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 instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UT–Battelle, LLC.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), formerly the National Leadership Computing Facility, is a designated user facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. It contains several supercomputers, the largest of which is an HPE OLCF-5 named Frontier, which was ranked 1st on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers as of June 2023. It is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
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; an extenuated research specialization that's from High-Performance Computing Systems.
PERCS is IBM's answer to DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative. The program resulted in commercial development and deployment of the Power 775, a supercomputer design with extremely high performance ratios in fabric and memory bandwidth, as well as very high performance density and power efficiency.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
The K computer – named for the Japanese word/numeral "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer was based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It was used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system was based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan was the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 3.86-petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States of America. As of June 2024, it is the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list. It held the number 1 position on this list from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
The High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark is a supercomputing benchmark test proposed by Michael Heroux from Sandia National Laboratories, and Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek from the University of Tennessee.
Sierra or ATS-2 is a supercomputer built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for use by the National Nuclear Security Administration as the second Advanced Technology System. It is primarily used for predictive applications in nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship, helping to assure the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear weapons.