91av

THE persistent theft of components from one of Britain’s largest academic
supercomputers is taking a sinister turn. A scientist is warning that
thieves might be selling the computer’s brainpower to Iraq or al-Qaida for
clandestine weapons research.

“These computers are perfect for weapons research,” says Carlos Frenk,
director of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC).
“There’s clearly something going on here that should be of great concern to
political authorities.”

The computer in question is the ICC’s £1.5 million Cosmology Machine,
which began work in July 2001. It was designed to simulate how the Universe
evolved as galaxies formed and clustered together, and could perform a mammoth
456 billion calculations every second.

On 18 December last year, thieves broke into the ICC and ruined four of the
computer’s 12 hefty circuit boards while trying to prise them out with a
screwdriver. Initially, Frenk thought that the thieves were clueless
opportunists who hoped the boards might have resale value, not realising that
their botched attempt would make their haul useless anyway.

But when the thieves returned, suspicions grew that the boards were being
stolen to order for a particular client. On 22 December, they escaped with four
boards after being chased by a security guard. A third attempted burglary in
January this year failed
(91av, 12 January, p 13).

The ICC replaced some boards and upgraded security measures. But about eight
robbers broke in again on 3 February, this time bagging all the circuit boards,
including previously damaged ones that were awaiting repair. When challenged,
they threatened to shoot a security guard.

Frenk says the pattern gives cause for concern. The repeated break-ins
suggest the thieves are willing to risk long prison sentences and that they have
already been able to sell the boards on. No legitimate organisation would buy
such unique and identifiable stolen goods.

The thieves are also taking boards that they know to be damaged. So their
client must have enough electronics and engineering expertise to repair them and
construct the complex supporting frames needed to operate them. “That’s one
reason I started to think there’s something very sinister about this,” says
Frenk.

He concludes that the hardware might be sold to terrorist organisations, or
states such as Iraq that covet nuclear technology, for weapons research.
Supercomputers are used to simulate the ignition and evolution of nuclear
reactions. “If you want to simulate a nuclear explosion, this is exactly the
sort of computer you would use,” Frenk says.

The world’s fastest computer, for example, carries out virtual testing to
allow the US to maintain its weapons stockpile. Known as the ASCI White, it
covers an area the size of two basketball courts and performs 12 trillion
calculations per second at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California.

Computers like the ICC’s are also used for air-traffic control and code
breaking. Another possible use is predicting the outcome of bioterrorist
attacks, by simulating the spread of infection throughout a population.

“Today you cannot have a vigorous weapons programme—biological, nuclear
or chemical—without lots of computing power,” says Frenk. He adds that
computer thieves probably view universities as a soft target because they don’t
have the fortress-like security of military labs.

But Daryl Landeg of Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston
says weapons developers probably wouldn’t go to all this trouble. “There are
easier things they can do,” he says. Although some of the most complex studies
of weapons design require specialised machines, much of the work could be done
with off-the-shelf computers. “You can buy a bunch of PCs, link them together
with decent networking, then use open-source software to run them as a parallel
computer,” says Landeg.

But Frenk says that even if there’s a small chance his hunch is correct,
there is cause for concern. “But as far as I can tell, this is being treated as
a sort of low-level crime.”

Durham police say they’re keeping an open mind. They are working on the case
with London’s Metropolitan Police and don’t want to discuss their lines of
enquiry. “Our main concern is to try and identify who’s organising it,” a
spokesman said. “If there was further concern about using these computers for
weapons control or something, that would be an issue for another agency, such as
the Foreign Office.”