Distinguished high-performance computing leaders to share lessons from assessing HPC systems

HERNDON, Va., Sept. 15, 2026 – ShorePoint, LLC, a leading cybersecurity services firm dedicated exclusively to strengthening federal customers’ cyber resilience, announced today that Ian Lee, Director of Advanced Computing Solutions, will moderate a panel discussion at this year’s National Cyber Summit, scheduled for September 22 – 24 in Huntsville, Alabama. Lee will facilitate a conversation with HPC practitioners from the Department of Energy, the national laboratory community and the Department of War. Together, they bring experience across facility-scale deployments, classified and unclassified enclaves and the full lifecycle from architectural design and deployment through use-case driven resource optimization and ongoing independent security assessment.

“As AI workloads move onto HPC-class infrastructure, the assumptions built into traditional security frameworks start to break down,” said Matt Brown, co-founder and CEO of ShorePoint. “Ian has been at the center of that conversation for years, and I’m proud to have him representing ShorePoint alongside the other experts on this panel.”

“HPC environments run some of the country’s most consequential workloads, yet security for these systems is consistently a secondary concern to performance,” said Lee. “Having voices from DOE, Sandia, Oak Ridge, and the DoW HPC Modernization Program on one stage is a rare chance to hear where the gaps are showing up and how to close them.”

SESSION INFORMATION

Title: Securing America’s Scientific Backbone: Hard Lessons from Assessing Production HPC Systems

Date | Time: Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026 | 1:15-2 p.m. CDT

Room: Ballroom 2

Track: Government Focused

Presenters:

Moderator: Ian Lee, Director, Advanced Computing Solutions, ShorePoint, LLC

Panelist: Ryan Adamson, CISO, American Science Cloud, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Panelist: Rickey Gregg, Associate Director of Security, DoW HPC Modernization Program

Panelist: Chris McFearin, Director, Office of Cyber Assessments, Department of Energy

Panelist: Aron Warren, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratory

Description:

High-performance computing systems are the foundation of America’s scientific leadership, national security research and AI innovation. Traditional security frameworks were not designed for the scale, scheduling architectures, shared-user models and performance constraints that define production HPC, creating a persistent gap between policy requirements and operational reality. Panelists will share practitioner-driven lessons from real assessments of production HPC systems: where standard FISMA and RMF controls fall short, how HPC-specific telemetry and workload scheduling create unique detection opportunities and blind spots and what assessors consistently find that operators miss.

To schedule an interview with Lee before, during or after the National Cyber Summit, contact Joyce Bosc at 301-717-9529 or jbosc@boscobel.com.

About ShorePoint

ShorePoint is an elite, fast-growing cybersecurity services firm dedicated exclusively to strengthening the cyber resilience of federal agencies and their missions. With deep expertise and a forward-looking approach, ShorePoint’s experts operate where tomorrow’s threats are already taking shape — from AI and high-performance computing security to post-quantum cryptography readiness — helping customers stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape. ShorePoint is based in Herndon, VA. www.shorepointinc.com

DOE’s federated HPC initiative is outpacing its own security architecture

ShorePoint today announced that Ian Lee, the company’s Director of Advanced Computing Solutions, published an op-ed in Washington Technology examining the security risks emerging from the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission. The piece argues that as DOE moves to connect sovereign high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure at national laboratories to commercial cloud platforms and a broader research population, the security architecture protecting those systems has not kept pace.

“Federal agencies are under real pressure to move fast on high-performance computing, because the mission outcomes are too important to wait,” said Ryan McCullough, Chief Growth Officer at ShorePoint. “But these systems were never designed to connect with autonomous systems, which changes the risk profile entirely. The agencies that succeed here will be the ones that match the urgency of the security work to the urgency of the mission itself.”

In the op-ed, “The Genesis Mission has a security problem,” Lee outlines four specific risk areas the Genesis Mission introduces:

• Federated identity and access management across trust domains
• Software supply chain exposure in AI and HPC workloads
• Gaps in behavioral analytics and insider threat detection as the user population expands, and
• Federal security frameworks that haven’t yet caught up to the realities of exascale AI workloads.

He calls for honest, risk-scoped cyber assessments, investment in telemetry and analytics infrastructure, and security governance structures that bring practitioners to the design table from the start — not as a downstream review step.

“None of this is an argument against the Genesis Mission. Federated AI compute at national scale is a strategic imperative, and DOE is right to pursue it,” said Lee. “But the window to get the security architecture right won’t stay open much longer. The labs have the talent, and the community has the knowledge. What this moment calls for is making security a first-order design requirement, alongside performance and access.”

Read the full op-ed, “The Genesis Mission has a security problem,” in Washington Technology here.

About ShorePoint

ShorePoint is an elite, fast-growing cybersecurity services firm dedicated exclusively to strengthening the cyber resilience of federal agencies and their missions. With deep expertise and a forward-looking approach, ShorePoint’s experts operate where tomorrow’s threats are already taking shape — from AI and high-performance computing security to supply chain assurance — helping customers stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape. ShorePoint is based in Herndon, VA. www.shorepointinc.com

Article drawn from DOE’s NLIT 2026 Summit explores foundational data preparation challenges.

ShorePoint’s Director of Advanced Computing Solutions, Ian Lee, has published a new analysis in OrangeSlices examining the foundational challenges federal national laboratories must address before artificial intelligence can deliver on its promise in classified environments. The piece, drawn from a panel Lee participated in at the 2026 NLIT Summit, argues that the most pressing obstacle to deploying AI against classified archives is not architectural. It is the state of the underlying data itself.

“Federal agencies and national laboratories are under real pressure to move faster with AI, and that urgency is justified,” said Ryan McCullough, Chief Growth Officer at ShorePoint. “The organizations that will ultimately succeed are the ones willing to do the foundational work first. Getting the data ready is not the glamorous part of this effort, but it is the part that everything else depends on.”

The federal government holds decades of irreplaceable scientific and mission data that AI could make genuinely accessible for the first time. In the article, “Before You Can Ask the Question, You Have to Own the Data,” Lee lays out some challenging realities about data quality, governance, and classification guidance to be addressed before access to that valuable data may be realized at scale.

Lee’s analysis outlines a three-tier architecture discussed at the NLIT Summit, a leading event for IT and cybersecurity professionals affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories. Lee and the other panel experts outlined the architecture structure, where data storage, access governance, and AI reasoning are separated so that AI systems never directly access classified archives.

The approach reflects sophisticated thinking about how to govern and protect classified data at scale. However, Lee argues its promise depends entirely on foundational work that must come first, including accurate and machine-readable metadata across classified archives and authoritative classification guidance consistently interpreted across organizational units. Additionally, data rights frameworks must be resolved for any shared or multi-party AI infrastructure. Without those foundations in place, the governed knowledge layer that sits at the center of the architecture “cannot make reliable access decisions regardless of how sophisticated the access control technology is.”

“The question of which AI architecture to adopt is premature if the underlying data cannot support it,” writes Lee. He goes on to pose three questions to guide federal leaders’ next steps before investing in the AI infrastructure.

The full article is available now on OrangeSlices. Read the full piece here.

About ShorePoint

ShorePoint is an elite, fast-growing cybersecurity services firm dedicated exclusively to strengthening the cyber resilience of federal agencies and their missions. With deep expertise and a forward-looking approach, ShorePoint’s experts operate where tomorrow’s threats are already taking shape — from AI and high-performance computing security to supply chain assurance — helping customers stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape. ShorePoint is based in Herndon, VA. www.shorepointinc.com

ShorePoint announced today it has been named a finalist in the first-ever Moxie All Stars Award, in the GovCon category.

ShorePoint announced today that Ian Lee, will participate as a featured panelist at the NLIT Summit ‘26, to be held May 4–7 in Kansas City, Missouri.