General Motors’ defense business has signed a memorandum of understanding with NP Aerospace, a UK and Canada-based manufacturing company, to collaborate on research and development, post-production support and global logistics sustainment initiatives for military products.

Signed during the Defense and Security Equipment International 2023 event, the agreement covers the areas of integrated vehicles, power and propulsion, autonomy and connectivity, fuel cell, power generation, system integration and platform integration, GM Defense announced from London, England on Wednesday.

Steve duMont, president of GM Defense and a 2023 Wash100 Award recipient, highlighted NP Aerospace’s “proven track record and expertise,” which he said complements GM Defense.

“This collaboration will help position our commercial-based solutions, including the ISV and HD SUV, to global militaries while aligning our capabilities to meet the needs of the UK Ministry of Defence’s Land Industrial Strategy,” he added.

Built on the foundation of the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck architecture, the ISV is constructed with 90 percent commercial-off-the-shelf parts. These elements include Chevrolet Performance components that have been tailored to meet U.S. Army needs.

GM Defense recently launched the ISV Family of Vehicles, offering a variety of options to meet specific mission needs. Currently, GM Defense is also working on a purpose-built Heavy-Duty armored Sport Utility Vehicle.

The MOU multiplies the array of vehicles maintained under NP Aerospace’s Vehicle Systems, Services and Spares business, which currently holds contracts from the UK Ministry of Defence and Canadian Department of National Defence. It will also boost GM Defense’s ability to effectively deliver its products to military customers.

“Our collaboration with GM Defense is very exciting as it diversifies our product and technology offering established through the UK MoD protected mobility fleet contract and expands our vehicle armour and engineering capabilities into North America,” said NP Aerospace CEO James Kempston.

This agreement follows GM Defense’s recent integration of GM Defense Canada and establishment of GM Defense International in 2022.

The Department of Energy has selected 11 research projects led by DOE national laboratories to receive a total of $73 million in funding to study new ways to help transition new technologies from discovery to commercialization.

DOE said Monday the teams will focus on discovery and use-inspired research to address gaps that limit the maturation of early-stage discoveries to deployable technologies.

“This research will integrate novel concepts and approaches in use-inspired basic research to address gaps or challenges that limit the ultimate transition to applied research for further development and demonstration,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of the DOE Office of Science.

Among the approved projects is an Argonne National Laboratory-led initiative to develop tools that combine artificial intelligence, robotics, human interfaces and digital twins to replace legacy technologies that produce isotopes for various applications.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory will also lead a project to study and model the behavior of microbes in bioreactors to determine why biomanufacturing processes that work well in the laboratory often fail during mass production.

DOE chose the projects through a competitive peer review.

The University of Southern Mississippi has secured funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop a data assembly hub for NOAA’s uncrewed system operations.

NOAA said Friday the pilot project will collect and aggregate environmental data and observations for analysis in support of the agency’s future data management strategy for using and managing commercial cloud computing infrastructure.

“The Data Assembly Hub will support businesses, policy makers and researchers into the future and enable the latest artificial intelligence techniques,” said Henry Jones, director of research development and scientific entrepreneurship at USM.

The program is also meant to support the growth of the U.S. blue economy by improving the collection, analysis and dissemination of ocean and coastal-derived data to address societal challenges and support economic growth.

The data assembly hub initiative is worth $2.5 million over two years.

In February 2021, NOAA entered a 10-year agreement with USM to conduct UxS testing and evaluation to enable enhanced operation of the systems for better environmental data collection.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory installed a new supercomputer that can calculate 12 petaflops per second, reportedly reducing the simulation and data processing time from years to days.

AFRL said Monday the Raider supercomputer is a product of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, and is also accessible to the U.S. Navy and Army.

The system, which is located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, has 189,000 processors. Its computing speed can condense a five-year research or acquisition timeline into approximately 200 days, according to Kelly Dalton, technical director at AFRL’s DOD Supercomputer Resource Center.

AFRL’s Digital Capabilities Directorate has already ordered the next two supercomputers to be delivered in 2024, as the laboratory and DOD implement a continuous upgrade strategy to stay abreast of the latest technology.

“We’re trying to help the scientists and engineers do the work faster and with higher fidelity so they can produce superior capabilities for the warfighter,” Dalton said. “In terms of AFRL, we are trying to advance the research being done here.”