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National Security Innovation Network Announces 4 Winning Teams of Cyber Hackathon
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National Security Innovation Network Announces 4 Winning Teams of Cyber Hackathon

The National Security Innovation Network awarded contracts to four winning teams from the startup and student tracks to continue developing their prototypes with the Department of Defense following the selection of their proposed concepts during the Reality Bytes: Visualizing Cyber Operations hackathon.

Two teams from the startup track – Cyberspatial and SeeSignal – each received $25,000 in contracts and the two teams from the student track – Team CyberCOP from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Team CyberVIEWS from Georgia Tech – won contracts valued at $10,000 each, NSIN said Tuesday.

The hackathon started on May 9 and the teams worked with Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to determine how gaming technologies could be used to track and visualize cyber operations. Participants used commercial-off-the-shelf virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to address cybersecurity military challenges.

On May 25, eight finalist teams advanced to the competition’s final round and demonstrated to judges their proposed cybersecurity platforms.

“We really wanted it [the hackathon] to be fun and interesting and compelling for people that we’d be hiring in the future to be able to defend the nation,” said Rachel Bondi, NAVWAR PMW 130’s technical director.

“It’s creating a community of people in industry that are interested in the cyber defense applications, specifically to the military and building that community. As far as the winners go, we have paths for them to pursue internally so that we can actually look at doing prototypes and perhaps pilots of their solutions,” Bondi added.

NSIN is a government program office within the office of the secretary for research and engineering at DOD and works with the venture community and universities to develop national security platforms.

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NVIDIA, HPE in Construction Phase of Supercomputer for Los Alamos National Laboratory
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NVIDIA, HPE in Construction Phase of Supercomputer for Los Alamos National Laboratory

NVIDIA Corp. has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to deliver a NVIDIA Grace central processing unit system to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The newly designed Venado system will support modeling, simulations and data analysis for the laboratory’s various research initiatives and projects, the Los Alamos, New Mexico-based team said Monday.

“This advanced system pushes new technical boundaries, enabling Los Alamos researchers and collaborators to make new discoveries, benefiting the nation and society as a whole,” commented Irene Qualters, associate Laboratory director for simulation and computation.

Through the Venado system co-creation, NVIDIA, HPE and Los Alamos are aiming to produce a software environment that sustains developer output and customizable, portable parallel programming models. Venado is also slated to help grow an Arm-powered high performance computing and artificial intelligence development ecosystem.

HPE serves as the system provider, with Venado constructed on the HPE Shasta system. It is named after Venado Peak, a mountain in the Taos vicinity. Venado is build to withstand and operate heterogeneous task orders such as artificial intelligence-based materials science, energy research and modeling and simulation of unmanned vehicles. The latter function could contribute to anti-wildfire efforts.

According to Gary Grider, division leader of high performance computing at Los Alamos, these various capabilities are made possible by the new system’s Grace CPU Superchip nodes and Grace Hopper Superchip nodes.

Venado is scheduled for completion in 2023. It will succeed the Los Alamos facilities’ current Chicoma supercomputer, an HPE Olympus system that is seen as a bridge to the more powerful Venado. The new system’s installation will be followed by a collaborative deployment of computing, memory and software technologies with Venado as a launching pad.

The Venado announcement follows NVIDIA’s April release of a program that realizes scientific digital twins via a neural network framework and 3D virtual world simulation technology. The Venado system will likewise offer digital twin capabilities.

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GovCon Expert Steve Orrin Discusses Confidential Computing; Government Cloud Security
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GovCon Expert Steve Orrin Discusses Confidential Computing; Government Cloud Security

GovCon Expert Steve Orrin, chief technology officer and senior principal engineer at Intel Federal, participated in a recent interview with the Cloud Security Podcast to explore the impact that cloud computing capabilities are having on the federal government to handle sensitive data, Azure Confidential Computing and the reason why handling data for the government is different.

“What’s different about government applications? There are regulations for federal agencies and at the core, the reason is that government data is critically important. For the data to become actionable and operate for the U.S. military or the intelligence community, the security of all that data is critical and must be protected from adversaries,” GovCon Expert Steve Orrin explained.

Orrin also detailed the fact that any government has a different set of requirements than the other sectors across the landscape like the private, financial, or health sectors. He explained that all of those industries have extremely sensitive data with regulatory requirements, but the government has a higher bar for their systems and national security efforts to ensure sustainable protection. 

Throughout the interview, GovCon Expert Steve Orrin also discussed the shift in trust between CSPs and the federal government as well as the controls to protect data sovereignty, the different levels of maturity in Azure, and the role of zero-trust architecture in confidential computing. 

Visit the Cloud Security Podcast to learn more about Confidential Computing and listen/watch to the full interview. 

During a recent Executive Spotlight interview, Steve Orrin shared his thoughts regarding the impact of zero-trust on government agencies and the difficulties they are having to implement ZTA and renew the government’s focus on data security. Here’s an excerpt from the Spotlight with Orrin: 

“The first thing to recognize is that zero-trust is an approach. It’s not a product or a piece of technology that you can plug and play. There’s no silver bullet,” Orrin explained. “Many people are under the impression that zero-trust means going back to zero and throwing away everything you’ve done before. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Zero-trust builds off defense-in-depth and risk-based approaches to security but takes us to the next level.” 

Visit GovCon Wire, to read the full Executive Spotlight with GovCon Expert Steve Orrin.

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U.S. Army Awards Akima Subsidiary Contract for Cyber Modernization Program Services; Barry Smallwood Quoted
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U.S. Army Awards Akima Subsidiary Contract for Cyber Modernization Program Services; Barry Smallwood Quoted

A subsidiary of defense contractor Akima has won a spot on a potential five-year, $201.8 million contract from the U.S. Army to aid a digital modernization program.

Under the contract, Akima-owned Compass Point will perform services for the Georgia-hosted Cyber Capability Development Integration Directorate including helping with the cyber battle lab and developing concepts, analysis and requirements integration, the company said Wednesday.

Barry Smallwood, president of emerging markets at Akima, explained that the CDID runs assessments of prospective warfighters and is designed to boost “combat effectiveness and readiness in large scale combat operations and multi-domain operations.”

“We are pleased to support this work by providing our expertise in helping military and civilian government customers continuously improve Army capabilities,” Smallwood added.

CDID is an endeavor that intends to keep the Army up to date in cyberspace operations, signal communications and electromagnetic warfare.

Compass Point is one of four organizations tapped by the Army to supplement CDID activities. The contract also tasks the Herndon, Virginia-based team with information advantage assistance and program management duties. The work will be conducted at Georgia’s Fort Gordon, where CP will increase its staff to accommodate the needs of the CDID, with an emphasis on hiring technically accomplished veterans.

Smallwood attests that Akima’s family of companies is dedicated to ensuring that veterans and transitioning military servicepeople are a part of its legacy, providing them with “an opportunity to work for a company that allows them to continue to support the mission.”

The CDID work is the latest in several Army contracts over the last few months awarded to Akima businesses. In April, Sunik landed a $44 million contract for maintenance, supply and transportation efforts in Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Similarly, in March, Sunik received an $85 million contract for logistics readiness services at the Army Field Support Battalion in Fort Carson, Colorado.

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NASA Sets November Launch for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2
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NASA Sets November Launch for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA plans to launch NOAA’s third polar-orbiting environmental satellite to orbit aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket no later than Nov. 1.

NASA said Joint Polar Satellite System-2 is slated to lift off from the Vanderberg Space Force Base in California to capture global environmental data to boost accuracy of weather monitoring and forecasting.

The satellite will be renamed NOAA-21 upon reaching orbit and continue the work of its predecessors NOAA-20, which was launched in November 2017 carrying a solar energy-measuring instrument.

JPSS-2 features a Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument designed to collect imagery to support global observation of land, atmosphere, oceans and cryosphere.

NASA’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator will launch as a secondary payload for to JPSS-2.

GAO Recommends Executive Branch to Formulate National Broadband Strategy
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GAO Recommends Executive Branch to Formulate National Broadband Strategy

The Government Accountability Office has urged the Executive Branch Office of the President to pursue a national strategy that would align federal broadband programs with fragmented or overlapping purposes and synchronize coordination among agencies that manage such internet access efforts.

GAO said Tuesday the strategy for facilitating program alignment could include legislative proposals from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

The government audit agency made the recommendations after an analysis showed 15 federal entities are administering at least 133 funding programs associated with broadband connectivity and that millions of people in the U.S. do not have access to the service even though federal spending on these initiatives hit $44 billion during the 2015-2020 period.

As part of the audit, GAO had to interview federal officials and 50 nonfederal stakeholders, which include internet providers.

In May, the Biden administration kicked off a $45 billion effort to help everyone in the country gain access to high-speed internet by the end of the decade and NTIA put out three funding opportunity notices as part of the White House’s Internet for All initiative.

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MDA Sends 2 CubeSats to Space for Radio Tech Demonstration Efforts
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MDA Sends 2 CubeSats to Space for Radio Tech Demonstration Efforts

The Missile Defense Agency has deployed another two CubeSats aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to support several MDA and Department of Defense space efforts including the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program.

Aside from assisting in the HBTSS development, MDA said Tuesday the new set of CubeSat Networked Communications Experiment Block 2 space vehicles will be used to test in-orbit nanosatellites’ networked radio communications as part of the Nanosat Testbed Initiative.

Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the MDA, underscored the importance of having a tech demonstration program in support of the national missile defense system.

“Establishing reliable communications links between satellites in orbit means we can relay fire-control-quality adversary missile track data to the warfighter through our command and control, battle management, and communications system, so we can engage and destroy those threats,” he added.

CNCE Block 2 will also be used to demonstrate a new software-defined radio and a technology for supporting High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryption in space.

The May 25 launch followed the first CNCE Block 1 deployment in 2021. However, the first two CubeSats were retired prior to the latest launch.

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U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Advanced Rockets, Ammunition
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U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Advanced Rockets, Ammunition

President Biden said his administration will provide Ukraine with “more advanced rocket systems and munitions” to help its people counter Russia’s invading forces and continue working with allies and partners on Russian sanctions.

Some of the weapon systems that the U.S. will continue providing Ukraine are Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, radars, Javelin anti-tank missiles, artillery and precision rocket platforms, Mi-17 helicopters, ammunition and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Biden wrote in a guest essay published Tuesday in The New York Times that the U.S. is not seeking a war between NATO and Russia and will not attempt to bring about the ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

“So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces,” the president wrote.

“We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia,” he added.

Biden said the U.S. will continue to provide Ukraine congressionally authorized-financial assistance, address the global food crisis, help European allies reduce their reliance on Russia’s fossil fuels and reinforce NATO’s eastern flank.

He also explained the move of the U.S. to stand by Ukraine and shared his thoughts on the use of nuclear weapons.

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Navy Tests Mission Computer Replacement for T-45 Trainer Aircraft
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Navy Tests Mission Computer Replacement for T-45 Trainer Aircraft

The U.S. Navy has tested a new avionics computer technology that will replace the mission display processor of the branch’s T-45 jet trainer platform.

Naval Air Systems Command said Tuesday that two program offices put the Mission Computer Alternative through a flight test Monday at Patuxent River, Maryland.

The service’s PMA-209 air combat electronics program office developed the MCA system using the Hardware Open Systems Technologies framework as part of obsolescence management planning efforts.

HOST seeks to minimize the need for regular updates to mission computing hardware and software, according to NAVAIR. PMA-209 and the Naval Undergraduate Flight Training Systems program office collaborated to carry out the test.

The Navy is looking to apply the T-45 aircraft’s next mission computer for navigation performance and area navigation use.

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Pentagon Releases Guidance on Inflation, Economic Price Adjustment in Defense Contracts
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Pentagon Releases Guidance on Inflation, Economic Price Adjustment in Defense Contracts

The Department of Defense has issued a memorandum meant to guide companies and contracting officers on how to manage cost increases due to inflation under existing contracts and provide considerations with regard to the use of economic price adjustments when entering into new contracts.

The memo states that the treatment of cost differences depends on contract type and that vendors should inform DOD that the costs incurred are closing in on the limits specified in the contract.

Upon notification, the department may raise contract funding and the company is not obligated to continue contract performance beyond what can be carried out within the contract’s funded amount.

For fixed-price incentive contracts, the government may adjust the target profit in the event that the vendor’s actual cost differs from the target costs.

The memo signed by John Tenaglia, principal director of defense pricing and contracting at DOD, states that under fixed-price contracts with EPA, the government will shoulder the cost risk up to the limit specified in the clause.

For firm-fixed-price contracts, contractors should bear the risk of cost increases and those associated with inflation. The department said it is addressing queries about the possibility of user requests for equitable adjustment to address inflation under FFP contracts.

“For contracts being developed or negotiated during this period of unusually high inflation, an EPA clause may be an appropriate tool to equitably balance the risk of inflation between the Government and contractor,” the document reads.

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