Navy's research lab starts the bidding for $115M computing contract
Gettyimages.com / Jason Marz
By
Ross Wilkers
The Naval Research Laboratory seeks proposals for new protocols and systems with an eye toward transitioning from development to fielding.
The Naval Research Laboratory is now ready for industry to start working on and turning in proposals for a five-year, $111.5 million contract focused on high-performance computing systems.
Bids for the single-award contract are due to NRL by April 8, the lab said in a Thursday notice to release the final solicitation.
NRL's Center for Computational Science is looking to acquire research-and-development, engineering, technical and transition support services. That work is intended to aid in how the Navy adopts and uses computing and networking devices, systems and IT architectures.
The winner of this contract will be responsible for designing new network protocols and new systems, helping to develop new information assurance and performance monitoring tools, and demonstrating how information grids handle federated data and distributed infrastructure technology.
NRL is also emphasizing how the new systems transition from the development phase to initial fielding as part of this requirement.
The statement of work accompanying the solicitation describes NRL's desire for the IT architecture to support the needed research for fast, reliable, and robust, authenticated, assured and secure transfer of data among various parts of the overall system.
NRL also wants to further incorporate IT assets from massively parallel computing systems into other assets deployed in hostile military environments, as well as enhance human interface capabilities through the development of interactive virtual environments.
Information processing research will include traditional signal analysis and other high-performance computing applications.