Pine Gap has one of the largest computer rooms in the
world. When first built the room measured 5,600 square
metres. It is believed to measure now
16,800 square metres. To give an idea of the
size of the computer room at Pine Gap -
The Id Kah Mosque
in China also measures 16,800 square metres.
The floor area of the White House, (total of 6 floors) is approximately 55,000
square feet. This converts to
approximately 5,109 square metres.
Therefore the computer room at Pine Gap is approximately three times
larger than the floor area of the White House.
Having never seen any photos of the Pine Gap Computer
room, I would love it if someone could send me some photos so I can include them
here. Alternatively, I would love a tour
of the computer room – if anyone who can authorise this, is reading this.
It is rumoured that at Pine Gap, there are super IBM
computer systems on a floating platform, underneath the facility. Sequoia would be the logical choice. Sequoia is a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer built
on IBM Power architecture. It consists of 96 racks; 98,304 compute nodes; 1.6
million cores; and 1.6 petabytes of memory.
This article on the NSA explains the future computing needs of the NSA.
The supercomputers
can be likened to the story of the Library of Babel. The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge
Luis Borges. He envisioned the universe
in the form of a large library. It was thought that the library contained
every book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every version of
each of those books. These
supercomputers have the ability to do that and much more.
