Amazon Web Services has honored defense contracting company ASRC Federal with its advanced tier services partner distinction.

Awarded to organizations within the AWS partner network, this selective recognition is given to businesses that demonstrate exemplary technical skill sets and customer experience offerings, the Beltsville, Maryland-headquartered company said Tuesday.

Eric Velte, chief technology officer at ASRC Federal, noted that the company’s AWS credentials come from serving clients with the platform “through our centers of excellence and integrat[ing] these resources into our technology product offerings.”

ASRC Federal and AWS collaboratively offer comprehensive cloud-based strategies and a set of cloud management applications that aim to provide speedy and malleable interface and storage for users.

AWS advanced tier services partners are trained and knowledgeable about AWS processes and are seen as something of an ambassador for the AWS brand. In exchange, the network of companies can acquire resources through the AWS marketing development funds program. The latter program sponsors prototypes and the launch of embryonic research endeavors.

ASRC’s AWS notice follows the company’s Data Network Technologies business unit’s contract award from the Transportation Security Administration in April. Under the Dynamic Integrated Secure Connectivity for Operational Value and End Point Resiliency contract, ASRC DNT will modernize the TSA’s Security Technology Integrated Program.

In January, ASRC Federal Space and Defense landed prime positions on six pools of the General Services Administration’s ASTRO contract vehicle for manned, unmanned and optionally manned robotics work.

Red Hat has partnered with several U.S. Department of Energy laboratories, targeting their efforts to progress cloud-native standards and practices in high-performance computing environments.

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based open source software company said Tuesday it will work with the research teams at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, among others, to expand the possibilities of harnessing standardized container platforms to connect HPC and cloud computing impacts.

Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Red Hat, outlined the prominence of HPC technology in demonstrating computer-intensive applications’ strengths in scientific experimentation via containers. Wright says this caused an imbalance of standards throughout HPC sites and a resultant difficulty in constructing and implementing new programs that can be used in HPC, commercial and cloud settings.

“Through our collaboration with leading laboratories, we are working to remove these barriers, opening the door to liberating next-generation HPC workloads,” Wright stated.

A widespread, growing desire to operate containerized syllabi on traditional HPC architectures is attributable mainly to new discoveries in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, in addition to compute and data-driven analytics.

In their joint ventures with the DOE, Red Hat looks to combine their expertise in cloud-native and multi-cloud infrastructure with the laboratories’ innate facility with large-scale HPC execution. The collaboration will center on four focus areas aimed at gaining new understanding in exascale computing, touching on standardization, scale, cloud-native application development and container storage.

The work will find Red Hat’s team utilizing some of the most intricate and robust supercomputers in the world. Their partnership with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab will see the two organizations refine Podman, a daemonless container engine designed to develop, manage and run container images on a Linux system.

In addition, alongside the research staff at longtime partner Sandia National Laboratories, Red Hat will concentrate on deploying a Kubernetes-derived infrastructure at enlarged scale in order to test a simplified route for mechanism delivery of containerized workloads.

Red Hat’s new DOE announcement follows the company’s March deal to offer data integration services for a network of hospital research centers in Canada. Using Red Hat Integration, Toronto-based University Health Network consolidated 170 systems into one platform.

Lael Brainard, vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, told the House Financial Services Committee that she believes a central bank digital currency, stablecoins and commercial bank money could exist together in the future financial system.

Brainard said in her written testimony published Thursday that establishing a CBDC to complement cryptocurrencies would offer “a safe central bank liability in the digital financial ecosystem, much like cash currently coexists with commercial bank money.”

Conservative investors may find a CBDC attractive in stressful times and the potential wide availability of a digital banknote can possibly lower aggregate banking deposits, the Fed official added.

She proposed offering zero interest-bearing accounts or imposing consumer limitations if the Fed decides to move forward with CBDC development as part of risk mitigation measures.

The Department of Energy has announced $38 million in funding to support decarbonization projects at four national laboratories as part of the Net Zero Labs Pilot Initiative that seeks to support the White House’s goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

The funding recipients are Idaho National Laboratory, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, DOE said Wednesday.

“Transitioning to a net-zero future will require slashing carbon pollution across all industries — from shipping to manufacturing to construction, and even the operation of our national laboratories,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. 

“DOE’s National Labs are leading by example to address some of the most energy-intensive, hardest-to-decarbonize federal facilities to reduce our nation’s carbon footprint — mitigating the disastrous impacts of climate change, lowering energy costs, and supporting the growing clean energy workforce,” added Granholm.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for instance, is developing software, algorithms and other methods to enable optimized operation of energy assets and advance clean energy adoption.

DOE said it expects the platforms that will come out of the NZL Pilot program to be replicated at other facilities of the department, federal agencies and local and state governments.