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Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer
ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press."
Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.
It's Agency, not Administration
but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.
> WARNING: Job halted - lp0 on fire
Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore all belong to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), _NOT_ the National Security Agency (NSA).
OK - this is one of those postings where I ask: which of the links is actually TFA?!
I'd be fairly surprised, even if the NNSA has any interest in Tor, to see much effect...
Tor involves enough crypto-twiddling that it isn't quite as computationally trivial as static-content webserving; but on anything remotely resembling modern hardware it is still going to be bandwidth constrained, rather than limited by anything else.
A huge supercomputer at a site likely using IPs from a well-known and early allocated government block would be a lousy place to put it. What a hypothetical interested party would want is a whole bunch of cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names.
So now I won't have a witness to the fact that my girlfriend is being TOTALLY FUCKING UNREASONABLE when she calls me in the middle of an important design project meeting to complain about some store clerk being rude to her at the supermarket. Just great.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So...further checking reveals: - TFA states: National Security Administration instead of NISA (which was already noted earlier) which is more likely the actual Administration that is being stated in the article. - Still a long leap from /. assigning a new word to an Acronym that is notorious in the public eye.
- Seeing as the NSA (National Security Agency) isn't even mentioned in TFA.
A simple mistake?
Probably.
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Correction: NNSA not NISA.
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
I see a fire down the road /Pity the fool that supercomputes with you...
Burnin' out of control and I'm like,
Forget you...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The Department of Energy operates the labs, not the NSA .
They also need to update their SSL Certificate... I went to go look at the Event Calendar at https://lanleventsext.lanl.gov/ off their main page to see if the Fire was a planned event and wouldn't you know, the Cert expired on 6/2/11.. Doh!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names. :)
Yes http://cryptogon.com/?p=624 had "High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity" on just that in 2007
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yes, It's the National Nuclear Security Administration that has a presence at those labs. That's not to say that the NSA isn't doing something there, but they're much less likely to make that public. NNSA is under the auspices of the Department of Energy, which one would assume, since those are DOE facilities, which are traditionally associated with nuclear research (especially Los Alamos). However, claiming that the NSA is down gets more page reads, doesn't it?
There's no way the NSA lets their stuff go out to any other supercomputer, even one owned by the DoE. The NSA's institutional paranoia is legendary. Makes sense when you think about it, their mission is to safeguard critical US communications (government, financial and so on hence their participation in AES) and to do electronic intelligence gathering. Give that, one can understand how they get rather paranoid about informational security.
These big supercomputer are DoE (that is the NNSA's parent agency). They do all kinds of things, including weather simulation but a part of it as you might guess form the agency is nuclear testing. The US can't actually test its nuclear weapons anymore as it is a signatory to a treaty banning nuclear tests. So instead it does them by computer. These high end supercomputers really can simulate them down to an atomic level, so they can test and see how the nuclear weapons stockpile is holding up.
Or SIGFIRE.
Is that why my phone calls stopped making that click noise?
Get a web developer
Keep it busy, or it may get bored, start looking around, and then before you know it we are in a kill all humans scenario.
Cielo means literally "heaven," but is also commonly translated as "sky."
Super or not if they are idle give them the boot... It sends a message to the rest of the computers that they may be next.
I read that as "NSA fires idle supercomputer"
Too bad stupidcomputer, should have kept busy while the economy was slow!
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?