Earlier this summer, President Obama made an executive order to invest in and improve high performance computing (HPC) in the United States. The National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) will effectively create the largest, fastest, supercomputer in the world. The benefits to the country — and the world at large — are huge.
High performance computing (HPC) improves people’s lives: for example, HPC helps reduce pollution (by lightweighting airplanes), HPC helps protect children (by designing safer car seats), and HPC even improves our lives in simple ways, like ensuring mobile phones survive accidental encounters with the sidewalk. Supercomputers solve the biggest, most complex HPC problems, processing quadrillions of pieces of information per second. Such systems have a huge impact on our ability to make advances in science, medicine, engineering, technology and industry, but are accessible to a limited few in locations throughout the world.
While the NSCI’s goal is to significantly increase our nation’s current supercomputing capabilities, one of its biggest benefits will be accessibility. Currently, access to the largest HPC systems is reserved for large companies and governments with the money and knowledge to use them. NSCI aims to make supercomputing more readily available to researchers all over the country. On a grand scale, that means more minds with great ideas will have the opportunities to turn those ideas into actions and solutions. This could lead to more cures for diseases, advances in alternative energy and sustainability, and more advanced and accurate weather predictions. It also means safer cars, more efficient manufacturing and increased economic competitiveness. These are only a few examples of how this initiative could touch virtually every industry in the country.
Advances rarely come without risk, and a consequence of building bigger systems, of growing a bigger user community, and of merging big data with big compute, is that it will create a bigger target for hackers. Cyberattacks are permeating all industries, and hackers are getting more sophisticated every day. High-performance computers often contain highly sensitive information, which has always put them at risk. Creating the world’s fastest and largest HPC system makes it that much more tempting a target. Adding Big Data to the mix adds an additional level of privacy concerns. Plus, the increased accessibility to supercomputing created by the new initiative means many more points of access to target.
To mitigate these risks, we need to increase the focus on security in HPC. At Altair, our PBS Professional workload manager and job scheduler is the only product of its kind ever to have achieved the Common Criteria EAL3+ security certification and is also the only workload manager that supports multi-level security (MLS) solutions. Features such as these allow organizations to consolidate systems, so users at different security levels can access the same system. This, in turn, eliminates the need for multiple computers for multiple levels of security, increasing both collaboration and efficiency without reducing security. For example, by deploying a cross-domain security version of PBS Professional for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin was able to consolidate HPC systems, reduce costs, and improve system utilization and efficiency.
As we welcome more users to the supercomputing space, we need to ensure we have the right systems in place not only to encourage innovation, but also to protect it. Increasing our HPC security is now more important than ever. Let’s make sure we’re ready.
To learn more about Altair’s work with Lockheed Martin, read the case study here.
Bill Nitzberg is CTO of PBS Works at Altair.
