The Department of Energy has started soliciting industry proposals for a contract to develop the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s next-generation high-performance computing system.

ORNL said Friday the future HPC system, Discovery, will replace the Frontier exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and is expected to be delivered by 2027 or early 2028.

The future supercomputer should be interoperable with other DOE facilities under the Integrated Research Infrastructure initiative, have advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and generate three to five times more computational throughput for scientific applications than Frontier.

“This project is exciting because we will be building something even more capable than Frontier, with technologies that will push the edge of what’s possible,” said Matt Sieger, the OLCF’s project director for Discovery.

Discovery is expected to support potential study areas, such as training AI algorithms for scientific discovery, speeding up drug discovery and treatments for cancer and predicting the impacts of climate change.

ORNL said the next-gen supercomputer and its capabilities are expected to meet the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program’s mission needs.

Proposals are due Aug. 30.

The General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy have picked a handful of technologies to participate in the Green Proving Ground program, or GPG.

Under the program, GSA and DOE plan to invest $9.6 million into 17 up-and-coming technologies to asses building systems in operational climates, GSA announced Thursday.

Robin Carnahan, administrator of the GSA, said, “Right now, GSA and the entire Administration are making once-in-a-generation investments to address climate change, bolster our economy and infrastructure, enhance security and sustainability and build a more prosperous future for all Americans.”

The GPG program focuses on critical technological areas — building envelopes and enclosures, healthy and resilient buildings, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and on-site renewables — in joint forces with the Inflation Reduction Act, which has endowed $30 million for the expansion program.

The program has examined 107 technologies since 2011. GSA’s Applied Innovation Learning Labs will facilitate the testing of recent systems.

GSA expects this year’s test results to be available in 2026.

The U.S. Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force,  or 1MDTF, demonstrated the capability of the military branch’s long-range hypersonic weapon battery during a biannual joint training exercise held in June at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington.

The Army said Wednesday 1MDTF demonstrated the ability of the LRHW battery’s capability to integrate with joint echelons and sustain operations for over three days during Exercise Resolute Hunter 24-2.

The Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center hosted Resolute Hunter 24-2, the Department of Defense’s exercise focused on battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

“These scenarios provide invaluable sets and repetitions that build upon and reinforce the steadfast integration of MDTF capabilities in the broader Partnered Joint All-Domain construct,” said Col. Charles Kean, commander of 1MDTF.

Since 2019, soldiers have contributed to the hypersonic weapon’s prototyping process.

The service’s 1MDTF unit launched New Equipment Training in September 2021, completed the weapon system’s fielding process by the end of fiscal year 2023 and deployed the hypersonic capability in February 2023 as part of Exercise Thunderbolt Strike.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has provided an update on recent IT modernization and cybersecurity efforts and offered new details on upcoming projects.

The General Services Administration, which oversees FedRAMP, said Tuesday that it will periodically update the public on its current and future activities in line with its new roadmap for fiscals 2024 and 2025.

During the third quarter of fiscal 2024, the GSA launched its technical documentation hub automate.fedramp.gov, which is designed for cloud service providers to support the validation and submission of digital authorization packages.

The agency also recently published the final version of its Emerging Technology Prioritization Framework. FedRAMP plans to open submissions for industry requests for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, to be prioritized for authorization.

The emerging technology framework provides a list of cloud-based tools and services that federal agencies may use for their respective missions.

More recently, the GSA opened submissions for its Agile Delivery pilot program that will assess a new non-blocking process for reviewing changes to cloud service offerings. Applications to participate in the pilot are due on July 26.

Among the government’s plans is the publication of knowledge-base articles on how CSPs can avoid potential FedRAMP-related issues and delays. The first article will be on using domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance practices to protect government email addresses.

In addition, the government will recruit more software engineers, data scientists and senior security professionals to support the continuous monitoring and authorization processes and address increased demand due to the program’s growth.

The GSA plans on releasing new metrics to assess cost, time, security and other aspects of the FedRAMP authorization processes to improve customer experience.

In a previous statement, Clare Martorana, federal chief information officer, said FedRAMP’s 2024-2025 roadmap will ensure the secure and efficient adoption of cloud technology in government.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency has awarded $840 million to the Texas Institute for Electronics at the University of Texas at Austin to build a national open-access center to support 3D heterogeneous integration microsystems research, development and low-volume production.

The award was made under the Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing—or NGGM—program, which aims to provide an accessible chip prototyping capability to advance microelectronics innovation, DARPA said Thursday.

As part of the partnership, the Texas Institute for Electronics will establish a consortium to encourage collaboration among the defense industrial base organizations, domestic foundries, vendors and startups, chip designers and manufacturers, and other stakeholders.

According to Whitney Mason, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, having an accessible R&D facility “will break down silos and foster an ecosystem that enhances the U.S. competitive advantage.”

The NGMM program is funded by the Department of Defense and is separate from the semiconductor initiative under the CHIPS and Science Act.