(196a) Keynote Talk: Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing

As the world, and especially those in the chemical industry, progress forward with sustainability and digitalization goals, there is an increasing need to leverage High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities to drive innovation and solve complex problems. When we think about HPC solutions that we deploy in our environment, finding a balance between information sharing and protection of intellectual property is challenging but is manageable by implementing security by design concepts to ensure "cyber" is addressed from the inception and integrated fully with design, testing and implementation.

High-performance Computing is a technology that uses supercomputer and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. These systems typically perform at speeds more than one million times faster than the fastest desktop or laptop systems.¹ High-performance computing serves as a catalyst for understanding what the next generation will look like. No longer is this work done with on premise devices and servers, but we are progressing more to work in a cloud-enabled environment and sharing data with external parties that are involved in joint research projects. Transporting data allows for more rapid access to the data however this also requires us to be more diligent when it comes to data exposure and properly protecting the intellectual property associated with it.

Within companies like Dow, we leverage these devices to assist with aggregating data built on the need for computational development of understanding dynamics and general chemistry associated with the ability to determine impact with new ideas, areas we are trying to solve or the effects of change itself.

Collaborating with our businesses is critical in understanding what risk will be tolerated in this environment to drive what type of cybersecurity controls must be in place to minimize any data loss and provide visibility who is accessing this data. High Performance computing in an era where cybersecurity attacks are prevalent places even more emphasis on Cybersecurity design principles with regards to vulnerability and perimeter management. Some of the learnings and cybersecurity best practices will be discussed during the presentation.

References
¹ Wikipedia (High-performance computing - Wikipedia)