Analysts will be plenty busy at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new St. Louis campus, but they won’t use their powerful workstations around the clock. So General Dynamics Information Technology is helping NGA stitch together the high-end PCs so their unused compute power can be harnessed even when their humans are elsewhere.

“There’s a lot of [NGA] analysts that call the St. Louis area home, and as a part of moving into a new facility, they’ll be outfitted with all new IT at their desks,” Will Clapperton, a GDIT vice-president for geospatial services and solutions, told Defense One. “That analyst isn’t going to be sitting there 24 hours a day. Maybe they’re there eight hours or 10 hours, and then that machine is idle and has the ability to do other things. So, what we’re looking at, and we’re piloting, actually, with them is an ability, when it’s not being used by an individual analyst, to lash all those together and throw a more enterprise problem at that unused technical potential.”

Like other intelligence agencies, NGA has increased its use of AI to detect and preempt potential threats. Clapperton said this experiment in distributed computing aims to provide something like the rough equivalent of an extra supercomputer without the cost, power, and space. 

“This initiative doesn’t replace or eliminate the need for datacenter centric capability, but is an important augmentation to an enterprise approach to processing AI/ML workloads, particularly inferencing,” Clapperton said via email. “The more that data and results are pervasively shared (within the bounds of security and mission sensitivity) within a customer’s overall enterprise, the faster mission advancement can and will occur.”