High-Performance and High-Assurance

Abstract

Many Organizations are moving to web-based approaches to computing. As the threat evolves to higher levels of sophistication, many governmental and commercial organizations are also moving toward highassurance. This service-based approach offers many of the advantages of the cloud-based approaches. There is a natural partitioning of entity groups similar to the Google Megastore [1] concept, but the rigidity associated with forced portioning may not be attainable. This high-assurance requirement presents many challenges to normal computing and some rather precise requirements that have developed from assurance issues for web service applications, many of which are considerably simplified by high-performance computing paradigms. The most difficult part of scaling up to higher user levels is the maintenance of the security paradigms that provide mitigation of these generic and specific threats. Not to worry, high performance computing is here. Multiple cores and server clusters provide scaling at the thread level! But, the news is not all positive.