Continuity Infrastructure Administration

Overview

The Continuity Infrastructure Administration (CIA-DSC) is the Department’s engineering and operations organization. It is led by an Administrator and is responsible for the three Continuity Research Facilities, the computing and archival systems they house, and the power and cooling arrangements that sustain them. It is the largest of the Department’s divisions by staff.

The Administration leads the Continuity Infrastructure Initiative. Facility Alpha in southern Nevada reached initial operating capability on 18 August 2026 and hosts ALPHA-1, a system of 9,216 accelerators with a peak of approximately 1.1 exaFLOPS FP64. Facility Bravo, built in a repurposed former hard-rock mine on the Colorado Front Range, commissioned its first archive level in June 2026 and is fitting out an 8 MW compute hall. Facility Charlie in interior Alaska has operated a pilot preservation vault since July 2026, with its main vault under construction for completion in 2028.

With OLSR, the Administration also leads the Long-Duration Information Preservation Program, which studies how records can be kept readable for a century or more. The Administration’s assessment of archival media, DSC-TR-2026-005, shaped the layered design of the Bravo and Charlie archives, and it provides the preservation services specified in the Neural Data Preservation Framework.

The Administration’s engineering philosophy is conservative. Its facilities are designed on the assumption that external supply of power, parts and expertise may be interrupted for extended periods, and that the people who maintain them in future will not be the people who built them. Specifications favor proven technology, redundant supply and documentation written for an unfamiliar reader. The Administration regards the facilities themselves as long-duration experiments and publishes what it learns from operating them.

Responsibilities

• Plan, construct, commission and operate Continuity Research Facilities Alpha, Bravo and Charlie.
• Operate ALPHA-1 and allocate computing capacity among ICSM production, FSEP evaluations and the NCRP benchmark suite.
• Engineer power supply, on-site generation, energy storage and heat rejection for each facility.
• Lead the Continuity Infrastructure Initiative and the Long-Duration Information Preservation Program.
• Operate the Department’s archives, including tape, optical, microfilm and silica glass media, and verify their integrity on schedule.
• Provide preservation services for neural data under the Neural Data Preservation Framework.
• Plan compute and energy capacity for later phases of the Neural Continuity Research Program with DNC.
• Maintain site resilience, environmental monitoring and long-term structural monitoring at all facilities.

Organization

Facilities Engineering and Construction Office

Manages design, construction and commissioning across all three sites, including Alpha’s full operating capability, Bravo’s compute hall and Charlie’s main vault.

Power and Thermal Systems Branch

Engineers grid interconnection, on-site solar and battery storage, standby generation and cooling, from Alpha’s direct-to-chip liquid cooling to Bravo’s geothermal-assisted heat rejection.

Computing Operations Branch

Operates ALPHA-1 and its 410 PB parallel storage tier, schedules workloads across Departmental programs, and plans future computing systems.

Archival Systems Branch

Operates the Department’s archives at Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, runs media longevity studies, and conducts fixity audits and format migration.

Site Operations and Resilience Office

Oversees day-to-day operation of each facility, maintenance regimes, spare-parts strategy, environmental and structural monitoring, and documentation for long-term operability.