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IT to Fight Terror
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September 09, 2002 (Computerworld) -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb that helped end World War II, has since Sept. 11 focused the scientific expertise of its 7,500 employees on homeland defense and the war on terrorism while continuing its mission of nuclear weapons research.
The Los Alamos, N.M.-based laboratory, which is owned by the Department of Energy and operated by the University of California, is tapping into its expertise in everything from quantum physics to computer science. Research is backed by massive supercomputers, including a 30-trillion-operations-per-second cluster due to go online by year's end.
Los Alamos isn't looking for immediate results. Rather, it's applying its resources in arcane sciences to develop tools and even products that can be applied years down the road, though it will also commercially spin off promising systems quicker.
For example, according to Terry Hawkins, leader of the laboratory's nonproliferation and internal security division, Los Alamos is developing a method to detect biological agents such as anthrax by combining a biological antigen with a computer chip. The antigen, Hawkins says, "acts the same as a human cell" in detecting the presence of an agent. The antigen is housed in a double-layer membrane formed from lipids, a class of insoluble organic compounds that are constituents of living cells.
Electrical current in the membrane passed to the chip could give a user an instant readout of the type of biological agent it has detected. Hawkins says Los Alamos has already developed a system that can detect the potentially deadly Hanta virus, which is prevalent in mice in the Southwest, and he believes that in time it may be possible to develop a portable, programmable device that can detect a number of viruses. Such a tool could also play a significant role in helping public health agencies battle diseases such as the common flu, he adds.
Deborah Leishman heads a knowledge modeling team at Los Alamos that helped develop a tool called EpiSims for simulating the spread of epidemics - natural or terrorist-induced - in a large urban area. She says the tool will help public health agencies integrate data from various sources, such as emergency rooms around a metropolitan area, into a database that will provide insights that can't be gleaned from single data points.
Los Alamos developed EpiSims as a spin-off from an even larger program called Transportation Analysis Simulation System (TranSims) designed to model the ebb, flow and social interactions of people in a large city. Leishman says TranSims can help emergency management agencies devise evacuation plans for cities that don't have them, such as Washington.
Los Alamos has already modeled Portland, Ore., which has a population of 1.6 million. Leishman says she could use TranSims and the laboratory's supercomputers to model New York, which has a population of 8 million.
Los Alamos has returned to its physics roots to find new technologies for cyberwarfare. Scientists have figured out how to use quantum mechanics to encrypt data inside a photon. The process, called quantum encryption, ensures that users can detect whether a photon has been intercepted, Hawkins said.
Though the laboratory has transmitted such cryptophotons a distance of six miles in free space, Hawkins says Los Alamos has more work to do before such a method becomes routine.
The Los Alamos computer and computational sciences division supports these and other homeland defense projects at the most fundamental levels, according to Stephen Lee, deputy leader of the division.
His division is engaged in multiyear projects focused on, for example, better ways to extract and model data for simulating nuclear explosions or terrorists' threats. The trouble with data measured in terabytes is that comprehending it taxes the mind. So Los Alamos is working on tools to extract meaningful information from data and present it in a usable form.
Los Alamos Director John Browne sums up the laboratory's long-term mission in a message to employees that puts the emphasis on being able to "anticipate scientific and technological needs in five, 10 or even 20 years." But, he adds, Los Alamos must also be ready to refocus its efforts quickly in order "to accommodate sudden and unanticipated changes to meet new national security requirements."
An EpiSims simulation that shows the progress of a contaminant plume across the city of Portland, Ore.
TranSims Program:
This is a TranSims traffic and population mobility model, showing colored bars over a street map. The colors and the height of the bars reflect the relative density of the traffic on those roads.
Brightly colored vehicles traverse a virtual highway in the TranSims traffic and population modeling program. Tracking the movements of each vehicle is possible based on analysis of simulated populations and data gathered from census information and other regional databases.
Q Supercomputer:
When completed at the end of this year, the Q supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be one of the most powerful machines on the planet, able to perform 30 trillion calculations in one second.
Images courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M.
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