Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (98 page)

Smith no
doubt had his eye on NSA as a key future customer for his machines, which would
cost as much as $40 million. He spent three years working for NSA's
Supercomputer Research Center before leaving in 1988 to found Tera. Much of his
early money, in fact, came from NSA's partner, DARPA.

Encouraged
by Smith's research, a "senior intelligence official" approached Sid
Karin, the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and asked him to
help support Tera. "We don't have a lot of innovative architects like
Burton Smith and Seymour Cray," the intelligence official told Karlin,
"and they need to be nurtured and supported." So, in 1998, Smith
installed his first system in the San Diego center.

Nevertheless,
Smith still has his skeptics. One well-known computer designer fondly refers to
the Tera system as "Burton's folly." And even Smith acknowledges the
long odds: "Most people think we're out of our mind." Still, noted
one observer, "Burton Smith is the last man standing."

As the
supercomputer business began crashing, worries increased at NSA. For decades
the agency had quietly underwritten a large portion of the industry; the
massive number crunchers were the engines that powered its codebreaking
machines. Now agency officials watched SGI, following its takeover of Cray,
like spectators at a slow-motion automobile accident. Within a year and a half
of the acquisition the company was in turmoil. SGI posted a loss of over $50
million, a major layoff was announced, and the longtime chief executive officer
resigned. Noting that only three years earlier the company had produced the
graphics that made the motion picture
Jurassic Park
possible, one
reporter quipped, "The question was whether the company was in danger of
going the way of the dinosaur."

By 1999,
SGI looked like a boxer struggling to rise before the final count. Its stock
had plunged more than 20 percent, another chief executive officer had called it
quits, and the firm said it would cut as many as 3,000 jobs and spin off its
Cray supercomputer division. NSA was worried: it had contracted with the
company to build its newest supercomputer, the CRAY SV2.
[5]
The decision was made to open the
drawer of the cash register. "The United States is committed to
maintaining and building on its long-held position as the global leader in
supercomputing," said NSA's chief scientist, George Cotter. "These
powerful computers are absolutely essential to U.S. national security
interests. To that end, the U.S. government is committing significant support
to SGI's CRAY SV2 program."

Cotter
also noted the critical need for NSA to continue similar joint supercomputer
projects. "The government support reflects a continuing need for
government-industry cooperative development of critical technologies for
high-end computing," he said. "The SV2 will include technology
jointly developed with the U.S. government. This will considerably extend the
combination of custom-designed high-end processors with the high-speed memory
access that current Cray supercomputers offer." The new system was
expected to dramatically extend the capability of NSA's supercomputers with
exceptional memory bandwidth, interconnections, and vector-processing
capabilities. Its peak speed was estimated to be in the tens of teraflops,
faster than any supercomputer in existence.

In 2000
the supercomputer business came full circle. Like two
broke gamblers at a racetrack putting their change together
for one last bet, Burton Smith's Tera Computer acquired Seymour Cray's former
Cray Research from SGI. Thus was reborn Cray, Inc., once again an independent
company. It was good news for NSA. One report said the agency was involved in
the deal "because it wants at least one U.S. company to build
state-of-the-art supercomputers with capabilities beyond the needs of most
business customers." Work would continue on NSA's SV2, with delivery
scheduled for 2002.

At the
same time, Cray began work on a new Department of Defense contract, one to
upgrade a CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer. With the addition of 816 processors to
its existing 272 processors, the new machine will be the largest Cray system
ever built, with 1,088 processors and a record speed of 1.3 teraflops—1.3
trillion calculations per second. Four years after Seymour Cray died, a machine
bearing his name would at last break the tera barrier.

But
despite the encouraging signs, the supercomputer shakeout had convinced many at
NSA of the need to move away from the insecurity of the outside world and to
return to the black computer laboratories of Crypto City.

The
massive brain transplant began in February 1997, as the first supercomputer
began its slow trip from the basement of OPS 1. Its destination was the top
floor of the Tordella Supercomputer Facility, hidden away in a wooded corner of
Crypto City. More than a year later, the final supercomputer was carefully
nudged into place and connected by a spinal cord of secure fiber optic nerves
to the main body of the agency, a mile away. Once the operation was completed,
NSA possessed the most powerful electronic brain on earth.

Surrounded
by thick woods and protected by guard posts, double fences, and concrete
barriers, the Tordella Supercomputer Facility, is located on Crypto City's Ream
Road, a street named after NSA's fourth deputy director. The nearly windowless
outside walls of the 183,000-square-foot facility are decorated with
attractive, light-colored enameled metal panels. The life-support equipment is
housed on the first floor— an 8,000-ton chilled water plant, mechanical and
electrical support facilities, and 29-megavolt-amperes of electrical power,
enough to supply half of Annapolis.

The top
floor's five rooms contain, among other things, the Computer Operations Command
Center and approximately 150,000 magnetic tapes moved there from storage in
"silo-farms" back in the main part of Crypto City. Supercomputers,
such as the CRAY Y-MP EL and the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, occupy the rest
of the floor. Also installed in 1999 was the new IBM RS/6000 SP. This is a
faster version of the system that powered the company's supercomputer
"Deep Blue," which won a grueling six-game chess match against
virtuoso Garry Kasparov in 1997. The extra power and speed come from IBM's new
PowerS microprocessor, which is capable of crunching through 2 billion
instructions per second—more than double the power of the Power2 Super Chip.
The computer is the centerpiece for a system IBM called Deep Computing. One of
its primary uses is "data mining," searching through enormous
quantities of data, such as intercepted communications or complex cipher
systems, and coming up with the answer. The RS/6000 SP, said IBM executive
David Turek, is "supercomputing at your fingertips."

Moving the
tremendous amounts of information into and out of the supercomputers, like the
ultimate jukebox, is the massive dodecagonal Automated Cartridge System. As big
as a small room, and weighing more than four tons, this high-speed storage
device can hold 6,000 cartridges containing a total of 300 terabytes of
information—the equivalent of more than 150 billion pages of text. According to
NSA, this is the equivalent of one and a half million years of the
Wall
Street Journal;
it is also enough pieces of paper to circle the globe 3,000
times, or to fill a wall of books stacked eleven deep and running from New York
City to Los Angeles.

The
robotic arm has two cameras and a "hand"; the cameras find the bar
code of the requested cartridge, and the hand moves it to the retrieval area,
where the needed cartridge can be extracted. The arm can move cartridges in and
out of the computers at the rate of 450 an hour.

Such a
system is necessary when one considers NSA's information storage capabilities.
To store the massive amounts of data flowing in from its worldwide listening
posts, NSA a few years ago turned to E-Systems, long a key contractor on secret
projects for the agency. The solution was to link several computers the size of
telephone booths. When completed the system was capable of storing 5 trillion
pages of text—a stack of paper 150 miles high. Included was a new retrieval
system that permitted the access of any piece of information almost instantly.

As the
supercomputer industry began crumbling around it, NSA turned inward, creating a
top secret facility for developing its own classified computers. Known as the
Supercomputer Research Center (SRC), it was built in 1984 in order to leapfrog
over the rest of the world in computer power, as Project Lightning had thirty
years earlier. Only this time, the work would be done in total secrecy.
According to Lieutenant General Lincoln D. Faurer, the NSA's director at the
time, a principal goal of the SRC was to build a new generation of computers
that would be 10,000 times faster than the current generation.

Over the
years millions of dollars would go into research on subjects such as
specialized parallel processing algorithms, which would give computers the
superspeed needed to break increasingly powerful foreign encryption systems. At
the same time, SRC would develop ways to push American cryptographic systems
beyond the reach of hostile codebreakers. Little, if any, of the research done
by the SRC would ever see the light of day outside of Crypto City, so NSA would
be far ahead in the race for the fastest and most powerful computers on earth.

Constructed
at a cost of $12 million on a twenty-acre site at the University of Maryland's
Science and Technology Center in Bowie, the SRC is actually operated by the
Communications Research Division (CRD), part of the Institute for Defense
Analysis. For more than four decades the CRD has run NSA's own highly secret
think tank. Originally known as the NSA Research Institute, it was first
approved by President Eisenhower in 1958. Its purpose was to carry out
long-range, theoretical, and advanced research in mathematical and statistical
problems related to NSA's codebreaking and eavesdropping missions. The
institute also conducted a special summer program that brought together members
of the academic community and introduced them to members of the cryptologic
community.

At one
point, in 1965, the institute developed a unique piece of codebreaking
machinery that proved enormously successful. "That one piece of
equipment," said a secret 1965 NSA report, "by itself, has been
judged to be well worth the total cost of the Institute thus far."

Among the
early directors of the institute was Dr. J. Barkley Rosser, a professor of
mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, noted for his work in symbolic
logic and number theory. Dr. A. Adrian Albert, dean of the division of physical
sciences at the University of Chicago and an expert in linear algebra and
number theory, followed him in 1961.

Originally,
the NSA Research Institute was located behind a high wall on the campus of
Princeton University. But as a result of the antiwar protests of the 1960s,
NSA, fearing for the continued secrecy and security of the institute, moved it
to a boxy, three-story brick building virtually hidden in an isolated wooded
area off campus. Windowless except for the third floor, the mysterious building
has no signs to indicate the name or nature of the occupant. Eventually, to
further hide its connection to NSA, the Research Institute's name was changed
to the Communications and Computing Center. Specializing in such esoteric
codebreaking and eavesdropping disciplines as cryptomathematics, cryptocomputing,
speech research, and special signals processing techniques, the IDA-C3I, as it
is sometimes known, received $34 million in funding in 1994 and employed a
technical staff of 149.

In
addition to the Supercomputer Research Center, NSA also has a Laboratory for
Physical Sciences (LPS), which is part of the agency's Directorate of
Technology. Like the NSA Research Institute, LPS was born in the 1950s, when
the NSA's Scientific Advisory Board recommended that the agency establish a
"window on the world of academia and academic research in the physical
sciences." As a result, the agency collaborated with the University of
Maryland to create the LPS, with quarters built adjacent to the school's
College Park campus.

In 1992
the LPS moved into a new, nondescript 63,500-square-foot building on Greenmead
Drive in College Park. Leased from the university for $480,000 a year, the
facility, near a Moose lodge, draws little attention and does not appear in the
campus telephone directory. "We don't know what they do there," said
the administrator of the veterinary center next door.

The lab
was built at a cost of $10.9 million; its ultra-advanced technology is designed
to fast-forward NSA's ability to eavesdrop. Using magnetic microscopy,
scientists are able to study the minute tracks on magnetic tape and greatly
increase data density, thus enabling intercept operators to pack ever more
conversations into their recorders. Increasing computer speed is also critical.
To achieve this acceleration, the LPS contains a state-of-the-art molecular
beam epitaxy (MBE) facility to develop miniature lasers, optical amplifiers,
and other components made out of gallium arsenide.

But speed
equals heat. Thus the LPS is also pushing the limits on such technologies as
the development of synthetic diamonds, which are many times more efficient for
heat conduction than copper and far less expensive than real diamonds. For
example, an integrated circuit mounted on ordinary ceramic will turn a very
warm 87 degrees centigrade when its surroundings are at room temperature. One
mounted on synthetic diamonds, however, will reach only 54 degrees centigrade,
allowing NSA's codebreaking machines to be relatively cool as well as fast.