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October 1, 2004
When cyber security experts from some of the nation’s top research institutions gathered Sept. 27-28 for a summit meeting to better prepare for future cyber attacks, NERSC and LBNL were there to share their experience and expertise.
Cyber Security Summit 2004, an invitation-only workshop held in Arlington, Va., was organized by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with support from the National Science Foundation. A major driver for the meeting was the series of debilitating attacks launched against some of the nation’s leading supercomputing centers last March and April. While a number of centers were shut down as a result, NERSC was able to remain up and running.
Representing NERSC and LBNL at the workshop were Howard Walter and Scott Campbell of NERSC’s Networking, Security, Servers and Workstations (NSSW) Group, Nick Cardo of NERSC’s Computational Systems Group, Jim Mellander of LBNL’s Computer Protection Program, and LBNL Computer Protection Program Manager Dwayne Ramsey, who was an invited speaker. Walter co-chaired one of the breakout discussions, and Campbell was an invited member of a panel discussion.
"The biggest benefit to holding a meeting like this is building the trust relationships that are critical when it comes to developing an effective response to cyber attacks," said Walter, a member of the summit program committee and leader of the NSSW Group at NERSC. "When you are under attack, knowing who to talk to — and who to trust — can make all the difference."
The meeting provided a forum for computer security administrators, system administrators and center management to share information about the security intrusions last
spring at numerous high performance computing and/or university sites, to review and discuss security best practices, and to develop a trust network among sites in order to improve communication and real-time defensive responses between sites when future intrusions occur.
The agenda included a keynote presentation from nationally recognized security expert and author Bill Cheswick of the Lumeta Corporation, and a presentation from the FBI Cyber Intrusion Laboratory.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.
