The Utah Data Center, being built for the National Security Agency, is intended to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be operational in September 2013.

It has established warrantless listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas in a program codenamed “Stellar Wind.”

According to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes  (10¹⁸ bytes) per year.

NSA’s cloud

To mine that data, NSA has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns, unscramble codes, and store the yottabytes (10²⁴ bytes) of data in a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud.

The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the U.S. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world.

To support the program’s future growth, the NSA’s Oak Ridge research center is developing new computers that will reach exaflop speed — one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating point operations a second — and eventually zettaflop (10²¹) and yottaflop (10²⁴).