The Intelligence Fusion Center (IFC): a COTS-based information retrieval, processing, and archiving system

The Central Intelligence Agency's Intelligence Fusion Center (IFC) uses an integrated commercial-off-the-shelf information processing, archiving and retrieval system designed to support analysts, watch officers and managers in a multilevel secure environment. The system receives and processes documents from many electronic sources, including internal agency message traffic, external message traffic from multiple agencies and organizations and press feeds. Manual input of message traffic or word processing files is also accepted via keyboard, floppy disk, or magnetic tape. The purpose of the IFC is to allow analysts, watch officers and managers to profile the vast amount of incoming traffic and to identify messages related to particular incidents of interest to the operating organization. The IFC hardware consists of a 100base T local area network (LAN) equipped with workstations running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.11 and SOLARIS. The two primary servers are dual processor Pentium Pro DEC Prioris computers connected to 36 GB of archival disk space. The data is stored on two redundant array of independent disks (RAID) sets. The majority of client machines are dual processor Pentium Pro HP Vectras with 64 MB of memory. The system provides a powerful information search, retrieval and archiving capability using high end NT machines in a COTS-based environment.