Centers for Communications and Computing

For nearly 50 years IDA has played a key role in the research endeavors of the National Security Agency, providing cutting-edge research in those areas of mathematics and computer science that are fundamental to the NSA missions of protecting our national security information systems against exploitation, and providing the United States with effective foreign signals intelligence. The program has two intertwined research areas: communications research, and computing research.

Communications Research

The IDA Centers for Communications Research (CCR) in Princeton, New Jersey, and La Jolla, California, perform mathematical research that supports the NSA’s two missions: protecting the information and communications of the U.S. government, and deriving foreign signals intelligence.

Computing Research

While high-end computing is an important part of the research program at the Center for Computing Sciences (CCS), its mission has broadened over the years to reflect global political and technological changes to include not only high-performance computing for cryptography, but also cryptography itself, network security, signal processing, and computational/mathematical techniques for mining and “understanding” very large data sets.