HPCwire: CTC, Northrop Grumman Collaborate on Homeland Security

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September 22, 2006

CTC, Northrop Grumman Collaborate on Homeland Security

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education, has collaborated with Northrop Grumman Information Technology to develop an advanced security enterprise infrastructure for the national intelligence community and America's armed forces.

Northrop Grumman, a member of CTC's Corporate Program, worked with CTC to create a Distributed Enterprise Security Lab (DESL). Unique to Northrop Grumman, the DESL provides a virtual laboratory for simulating customer environments, developing security solutions and investigating new technology.

The Lab allows Northrop Grumman to test products that are designed to improve the security of cyberspace and physical facilities. Using a DESL, Northrop can test network and systems vulnerabilities, perform threat analysis and conduct attack/defend scenarios both locally and among different sites via the Internet. The high performance computing and relational database system developed by CTC allows Northrop to design infrastructure protection systems, including digital video surveillance systems with networked locations throughout the US.

Securing networks and physical facilities requires significant processing power. For example, to be effective, large volumes of network traffic must be monitored and thousands of surveillance cameras must collect terabytes of data that lie useless if not analyzed in a timely manner.

"You cannot have people staring at cameras or poring over computer screens," said Robert Brammer, vice president and chief technology officer for Northrop Grumman. "The process needs to be automated to detect telling patterns, and the data need to be archived so that histories can be tracked. Because of the computational power required to accomplish this, HPC architectures are a natural infrastructure. You need many processors, and you need to know how to sort through volumes of data and pick out the right piece fast."

With the distributed lab in place, CTC application and database consultants worked with Northrop Grumman to scale video and network surveillance applications. Applications that were originally developed to run on workstations were scaled to operate in HPC environments. CTC's database expertise was used to optimize data transfer and minimize latency. The scalable analysis and visualization of massive, integrated security databases is now possible on billions of records a day. In addition, the digital video surveillance systems can process more than 1,000 camera inputs. Threats are rapidly detected using pattern recognition technologies that assess traffic and personnel data. Currently, Northrop operates an integrated network of five DESLs over the Internet.

"Although the threat of terrorism will never be erased, we have made clear productivity improvements," said Brammer. "We are better equipped to deal with network security issues and to reduce the risk of terrorism. New technology has allowed us to uncover opportunities and strengths. There is no limit to the amount of computational power, storage, and database know-how that could be applied to homeland security cyberinfrastructure issues."

CTC is used by business and industry to incorporate high performance computing, storage, and database management technologies. Information about the CTC Corporate Program is available at http://www.tc.cornell.edu/corporate.

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