Scientific Computing and Security

As the malaise brought about by the events of September 11 in New York, the District of Columbia, and rural Pennsylvania draped itself around our collective shoulders, Americans were staggered by emotion and left to ponder some daunting questions.

What, exactly, transpired in the hours before those hideous attacks on our citizens? How could such a calamity have been pulled off? What can we do to prevent similar future tragedies?

While complete answers may elude us for a long time, if not forever, it is obvious that our nation and our world are in for some sweeping changes. Undoubtedly, technology will be at the crux of many of the imminent actions.

Regardless of who is found to be responsible for Tuesday's horror, it has become clear in recent months that there is a growing faction of perhaps undesirable characters who are communicating with each other with little to no fear that their messages will be overheard. Thanks to the increasingly tense technology market in the United States, encryption programs have become important tools in protecting companies' interests.

This type of software allows information to be translated into an unintelligible format that can only be read through the use of some privacy key. Unfortunately, many of these public domain programs have fallen into hands that are groping for more than just intellectual protection and a profit margin, allowing unfettered communication.

Much effort has been spent on cracking these codes, as disguised messages have been known to pass between individuals and groups whose intentions we would like to know. Because of the complexity of the encryptions, it is obviously impossible for someone to sit down with pen and paper and decode a message. Rather, CPU-intensive algorithms are required to attack this problem. In fact, many massively parallel supercomputers, the same type used to perform the calculations for scientific simulation, are employed in these decoding efforts. It is imperative that this effort be intensified, and it's likely that parallel computing will continue to play a big role in this process.

In addition to information monitoring, it is quite conceivable that science-based applications will become even more widely-used in improved security measures. We have discussed in this space the power of scientific visualization in signal and image processing. This capability is sure to be put to full use as monitoring and scanning devices become more sophisticated, increasing our capability to recognize weapons or other potential problems. The sheer amount of data will undoubtedly increase greatly, necessitating even better and faster data processing and

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