Parallel Works, Inc. and CoreWeave, Inc. today announced the deployment of a managed AI and high-performance computing platform for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program.
The managed platform, delivered through Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE control plane and built on CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform, provides researchers with immediate access to the large-scale computing, orchestration software, and technical support required for advanced biological modeling and AI, without the delays and complexity of building and managing infrastructure.
The rapid adoption of AI is reshaping scientific research. Delivering AI cloud infrastructure, however, can take months, which can delay research and consume technical resources. By delivering a fully managed environment, Parallel Works and CoreWeave allow researchers to train AI models and run complex simulations within days rather than weeks or months.
NODES addresses complex challenges in the dynamics of biological systems, work that requires large-scale, dependable computing resources. Rapid access to dedicated GPU resources enables program performers to pursue simulation and modeling campaigns without delays associated with accessing and managing infrastructure.
Researchers access the environment through a single sign-on, with the ACTIVATE platform combining direct support, dedicated compute, unified orchestration and operational visibility:
- End-to-end support: Parallel Works operates the environment for DARPA through its ACTIVATE platform, which handles user onboarding, identity and access, provisioning, scheduling, and reporting, with around-the-clock direct-to-expert support for both the platform and researcher applications.
- Dedicated compute capacity: A dedicated reservation on NVIDIA HGX H100 systems, enterprise-scale storage, and high-speed NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking. Parallel Works ACTIVATE divides the reservation across the NODES research teams, so each team holds a guaranteed allocation and can draw on shared capacity when it is available.
- Unified orchestration: Parallel Works ACTIVATE enables DARPA researchers to access SUNK and CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) uniformly from a single platform. SUNK, CoreWeave’s Slurm on Kubernetes offering, enables researchers to run workloads of different kinds and sizes efficiently in the same underlying compute environment. ACTIVATE manages the accounts, allocations, and sharing policies that determine how the research teams use those resources.
- Operational visibility: Parallel Works ACTIVATE provides the program and each research team usage and utilization reporting across the environment, while CoreWeave’s observability stack monitors the health of the underlying fleet, so issues are caught at the infrastructure layer before they cost time on a multi-week run.
More information on The Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program DARPA NODES can be found here: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/nodes
Microsoft Threatens Over “ShieldBreak”
Posted in Commentary with tags Microsoft on September 9, 2026 by itnerdFollowing Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday security updates, a security researcher uncovered a new Microsoft Defender zero-day exploit named “ShieldCrash,” a bypass for the recently patched ShieldBreak Defender privilege escalation.
Ensar Seker, CISO at cybersecurity threat intelligence company SOCRadar, provided the following comments:
“ShieldCrash is concerning not simply because it affects Microsoft Defender, but because it appears to expose a recurring weakness in how this attack path has been remediated. When researchers can bypass successive fixes for RoguePlanet and ShieldBreak, it suggests the underlying security boundary or attack surface may require a more comprehensive redesign rather than another narrowly targeted patch.
It is important, however, to describe the current impact accurately. The publicly released proof of concept reportedly performs an arbitrary file read under the SYSTEM security context on fully patched Windows systems. That could expose highly sensitive files that an ordinary user cannot access, including configuration data, credentials or other secrets. Based on the information currently available, it does not yet provide an attacker with a full SYSTEM shell or arbitrary write capability. Nevertheless, privileged file disclosure can become an important component of a larger attack chain.
Organizations should not disable Defender as a reaction. Security teams should closely monitor Microsoft’s guidance and Defender intelligence updates, ensure tamper protection is enabled, restrict local execution and administrative access, and hunt for suspicious processes interacting with protected files through Defender-related mechanisms. Because proof-of-concept code is now public, defenders should assume attackers are examining it for ways to expand the primitive into credential theft, persistence or full privilege escalation. Microsoft should also assess the complete vulnerability class and related code paths, not only the specific condition demonstrated by this latest proof of concept.”
Microsoft responded with warnings of legal action against anyone engaging in “malicious activity causing real harm” to its customers, prompting many to believe that the company was directly threatening the security researcher.
But the fact is that the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Therefore Microsoft will need to deal with it. So lets see if they actually deal with it or not.
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