[2][3] The project is sited at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and is split into two tracks, one top secret and one unclassified, housed in separate facilities.
Located on the laboratory's East Campus, the building covers 214,000 square feet (19,900 m2) and rises five stories high.
[2][4] While the unclassified portion of the HPCS project succeeded in designing the 1.3 petaflop Cray XT5 supercomputer in 2007, the MRF succeeded in developing an even faster machine, designed specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
A former NSA official called the MRF's breakthrough "enormous", giving the agency the ability to break current public encryption standards.
To achieve an exaflop machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet (24,000 m2), called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center.