NSA to Build $900 Million HPC Datacenter

J. Nicholas Hoover writes in Information week that the NSA plans to build powerful, energy efficient, secure HPC datacenter near agency headquarters in Maryland by December 2015. The price tag will be nearly $900 Million USD.

The specs for the new supercomputing center read much like the NSA is building a massive data center, with typical requirements for raised flooring, chilled water systems, fire suppression, and alarms. Power requirements are 60 megawatts, equivalent to the power requirements of Microsoft’s recently completed 700,000 square foot data center in Chicago, which itself is one of the largest ever constructed.”