U.S. Army Opens Cyber Analytics Lab

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) opened the Army Cyber-research Analytics Laboratory (ACAL) on July 19, a facility that unlike any other lab, provides industrial and federally-funded partners—including universities—access to highly-sensitive live cyber-security data, the service has announced.

The new research space was developed as a result of a partnership with Army Cyber Command and represents an extension of ongoing collaborative efforts with the Defense Department’s science and technology community, said Philip Perconti, ARL director.

The ACAL currently houses three distributed computation clusters, the largest of which is configured with more than two petabytes of raw storage, over 20 terabytes of random-access memory, over 1,500 central processing unit cores and 10- to 40-gigabyte networking. The ACAL relies on technologies most familiar to researchers, analytic developers and data scientists: Hadoop, Elasticsearch, R, Spark, Storm, Accumulo, Kafka and many others. Researchers will be able to access the laboratory physically or remotely to assess emerging cyberthreats, such as hackings and communication jams, and quickly develop and deploy cyber analytic capabilities.

The degree of high-performance computing and analytic development technology will facilitate the rapid development and deployment of cutting-edge analytic capabilities to meet the warfighter's operational mission needs in the cyber realm, according to the Army announcement.

Lt. Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, commander of U.S. Army Cyber Command, said the ACAL not only "represents a new capability, but a new direction in the way we develop and deploy capabilities to defend Army networks.”