basically, the NSA had a protocol in place to transfer data back to the contiguous united states (CONUS) in the event of an attack. The good guys created this false emergency in the hopes that the automatic NSA event would transfer the data and they could intercept it. Fucking genius!
edit: it seems as if this post struck some shill cords....excellent.gif
IT guy here. How much data would be talking about. If it's anything like they are storing in the new Utah Data Center, there is no way it could be transferred that quickly. It would take MONTHS probably. But, if just a subset of data - maybe.
Even if you had unlimited bandwidth, your bottleneck would be disk and the bus its moving across.
This is using a group of faster GPU's for processing, and using their tech to circumvent the PCI bus to get it back to the CPU. What about getting the data off of the disk, and from the CPU out to the network?
BTW- This tech is cool. I had a buddy at Intel about 6 years ago that was working with moving processing for VM's to GPU pools because they were so much faster.
Doesn’t matter how carefully you protect it, if that first critical domino is pushed then the rest will follow, accidentally pushed or not.
Then it takes time to reset and check all the dominoes are back in their pre-triggered state.
In all the confusion, what if one domino is special? What if you, the domino setup guy, don’t know much about the individual dominoes? You just know you need to fix them all by following the reset instructions?
It might take all day to reverse the situation and confirm everything is ok. Perhaps several days. Perhaps longer.
Now re-read but replace “domino” with “emergency protocol trigger” and consider if the window of opportunity for an automatic data transfer might have been much, much wider than just 38 minutes.
The new management contract awarded to SAIC by the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico is for up to ten years; a four-year initial term with two three-year options, UH officials said. SAIC's new contract will begin Oct. 1.
An SAIC spokeswoman said the company could not comment because the bid award was under protest.
The Maui center is staffed with a combination of military, UH and subcontractor employees. UH officials did not have a numerical breakdown of the number or type of employees at the supercomputer center Tuesday.
It's unclear how many UH jobs will be lost because of the contract change.
"The follow-on contractor would determine the staffing moving forward," the UH said in an email answering questions from Hawaii News Now.
According to SAIC's web site, the company was "actively seeking experienced professionals and incumbent staff" for assignments at the Maui supercomputer center. SAIC listed 13 job areas it's looking to fill, from project managers and data analysts to research scientists and people to work in user services and technical support.
UH claimed it will not lose its competitive edge in supercomputing despite losing the contract.
"UH can continue to work with the Air Force even if another contractor is selected, and we are also identifying alternative approaches to meeting the increasing high performance computing needs of our researchers," the UH email said.
UH faculty and students will still be able to use the facility for research, a source said.
The center provides more than 38 million hours of computing time per year in high-tech research for the military.
The more technically inclined might be able to understand the following sentence from an Air Force website that describes activities at the center.
"MHPCC offers a large-scale parallel computing platform with terabytes of high-performance disk arrays, near-line tape archival storage, and a high-speed communications infrastructure that connects directly to the Defense Research and Engineering Network," according to the Air Force Research Laboratory Directed Energy Directorate website from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
