HPC CYBERSECURITY

Large scale computationally intensive platforms, systems, facilities relying on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to enable large scale information processing for a multitude of areas such as business, utility, financial, scientific, and national infrastructure systems that form the backbone of our nation's economy, security, and health. HPC facilities, centers, infrastructure, or resources are designed to be easily accessible by users over a worldwide network, and ensuring effective cybersecurity monitoring, situational awareness, logging, reporting, preventions, remediation, etc, is an increasingly important task. An application submitted to this topic area must be unclassified and clearly address solutions for state-of-the-art HPC systems. Applications or proposals that do not address the range of desired products mentioned in this specific topic or are primarily focused on: Single node/host-, handheld-, mobile-, cloud-, cryptography-, statistical-, grid-, desktop-, and/or wireless-based solutions; internet; networking; internet-of-things; internet-of-everything; ransomware; blockchain; enterprise; deception; virtualization; out-of-band; cyber-physical; data centers; database; basic research; natural language processing; collaborative computing; computing clusters; distributed computing; human factors; computer human interactions; not focused specifically on state-of-theart HPC systems; visualization; social media; data analytics; web applications; social networks; authentication; firewall; hardware; edge computing; cryptanalysis; encryption; or propose to change, modify, and/or alter application's code, will be considered nonresponsive and will not undergo merit review. Grant applications are sought in the following subtopics: a. Cybersecurity Technologies This topic solicits unclassified applications that will deliver and market commercial products ensuring effective and practical cybersecurity for HPC systems, centers, and/or user facilities. The application must clearly address solutions for state-of-the-art HPC systems in particular. These tools will have the capability to detect, prevent, or analyze attempts to compromise or degrade systems or applications consequently increasing their cybersecurity. Any submitted application must be unclassified. Relevant evaluation metrics may include delivery of potential solutions involving minimizing the overall security overhead required to deal with data parallelism, concurrency, storage and retrieval, hardware heterogeneity, and how to monitor, visualize, categorize, or report cybersecurity challenges effectively. Current cybersecurity tools and products could potentially be enhanced or transitioned to help secure HPC systems. However, any proposal idea must specifically and clearly address solutions geared for state-of-the-art HPC systems. Questions Contact: Robinson Pino, robinson.pino@science.doe.gov b. Other In addition to the specific subtopic listed above, the Department invites grant applications in other areas that fall within the scope of the topic description above within the context of HPC.