August 15, 2006
[ return to the news list ]
Government Computer News (05/22/06) Vol. 25, No. 13,Wait, Patience
The controversy over the NSA's covert program of collecting data on millions of phones calls placed by normal citizens begs the question of how well the agency will actually be able to mine the vast quantities of information it is amassing. Although the NSA is not revealing any details about its databases or the technologies that it is using to maintain and search them, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that AT&T's Daytona call detail record (CDR) database, which was reportedly made accessible to the NSA, exceeds 312 TB. Assuming that figure is accurate and that Verizon and BellSouth provided access to databases of similar sizes, the NSA could have more than 900 TB of data on its hands, requiring massive storage capacity, intense computing power, and sophisticated analytical software. Access to the bulk of the database in real time is critical for effective data mining, though some believe the NSA is frozen out of much of its own information by virtue of its sheer size. "My impression--strictly a professional guess--is that at least 75 percent of what NSA 'knows' is...offline and not accessible," said Robert Steele, CEO of OSS.net. "You cannot do good pattern analysis, including historical comparisons, without massive online storage." SGI has begun developing computers with terabyte-scale active memories, the largest containing 13 TB, which is not enough memory to handle even 1.5 percent of the three CDR databases put together. Moreover, a computer's capacity for memory space is limited by its amount of address bits on chips, according to SGI's Bill Mannel. "Some of our customers who already have big-memory databases are looking for something beyond [what they have], but they have power and footprint problems," Mannel said, adding that the storage architecture must be overhauled to incorporate enough RAM to access the entire database.
For the complete article, see http://www.gcn.com/print/25_13/40827-1.html
Posted by rab5 at 09:23 PM
[ return to the news list ]
