TRANSLTR

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TRANSLTR is a fictional supercomputer appearing in Dan Brown's novel, Digital Fortress. TRANSLTR supposedly has 3 million parallel processors and is housed within the NSA's Crypto headquarters. The heat produced by so many processors required the use of Freon coolers. The machine's main function is to decrypt messages for the staff in order to prevent terrorist activities. As a matter of fact, TRANSLTR had stopped even nuclear attacks on the U.S, something Dan Brown revealed to us in his book. However, only the top echelons of the NSA have access to the top-secret, classified documents which hold actual instances when the NSA stopped terrorist attacks. In the novel, the NSA swore that TRANSLTR did not exist.

Some of TRANSLTR's power came from advances in Quantum Computing which stores information not only as either 0 (off) or 1 (on), but as 1, 0, or both 1 and 0 at the same time. Also, as a gauge of speed, the NSA's second fastest computer would take one million times longer than TRANSLTR.

[edit] Realism and potential existence of TRANSLTR or similar system

It is highly unlikely that a supercomputer with 3 million processors could or would ever be made. The current fastest supercomputer in the world (BlueGene Light) has only 131,000 processors, and the average supercomputer on the Top 500 Supercomputers List has only 500-1000. Considering the time and effort that have been put into BlueGene and other supercomputers, a 3 million processor supercomputer would be virtually unconstructable, and the number of processors employed would be unnecessary considering the high computing power that is accessible from less than 150,000 processors.

[edit] Role in Dan Brown's book, Digital Fortress

The TRANSLTR was supposed to be infallible, being able to crack any encryptions through a brute force attack. However, it came across an encrypted code that it cannot break. Called Digital Fortress, it was an unbreakable code that could not be cracked using a bruteforce method because it contained a "self-rotating cleartext", meaning whenever the computer found the correct key, the code could re-encrypt itself. The only man in the world who is better in cracking codes than TRANSLTR is "North Dakota" or "NDakota". The encryption turned out to be a worm that attacked the main database's firewalls. The worm brought down all security filters and a large number of hackers poured in to obtain information. However, the kill-code was activated and the firewalls were brought back up. TRANSLTR burned into ash in the end of the novel as a result of Crypto losing power and overheating without Freon coolers. NDakota is an anagram for Tankado, and in which Tankado tricks Strathmore into believing that it is just an encrypted code, but finds out later that it is just a worm that would bring down the firewall of the NSA databank. The only way to stop the worm is to enter a kill code within a set time, before the entire firewall is disabled. Tankado's plan was for the NSA to publicize that TRANSLTR exists, and after that, Tankado would give them the kill code. Unfortunately, Tankado was assassinated, which meant he couldn't tell them the code, but thankfully he put clues into the program so they could figure out the code if something was to happen to him.